memfree

Khan has been at the forefront of the Biden administration's push to use U.S. antitrust law to boost competition and address high prices and low wages. Khan, who oversaw the FTC's ban on noncompete agreements, has drawn the ire of corporate groups, but won fans including Donald Trump's running mate, JD Vance, for her skepticism towards big business.

Now, big money Democratic donors this week publicly said Khan should not be part of a potential Harris administration.

Prominent Democratic senators have spoken out in support of Khan, including senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Warren said on Friday that Khan should continue her work, calling it "a big reason the economy is growing strong as we saw with yesterday's GDP data."

-- or as Matt Stoller puts it in his 'BIG' (regarding one of the two, Hoffman):

Ok, so it’s pretty stunning for an oligarch like Hoffman, with a net worth of a couple billion dollars, to publicly make such a demand. So why is he doing it? One reason is that there’s a lot of money involved. As the Lever reported, Hoffman is on the board of Microsoft, which is right now being sued and investigated by the FTC. It’s a pretty good gig, if you get to fire the law enforcer investigating your misdeeds.

and thinks it likely that:

he’s going to supply the financing for Harris’ campaign if she does what she’s told.

In other words, democracy really is on the ballot, but not in the way people imagine. An oligarch has explicitly and openly taken over policy because it conflicts with his small faction’s control of American society. And so far, most political leaders are silent.

The only upside here is that Hoffman is being very public, aggressive, and explicit about his demands. And he’s going to corner Harris until she kisses the ring, or refuses to do so. From his perspective, he’s not donating $10 million, he’s making a purchase. Or so he thinks. Now it’s up to Harris to make the choice.

Given the shutdown/attack today, which targeted stations far from the capital, this, ah... did not go well.

Excerpts from article:

Security measures in Paris have been turbocharged by a new type of AI, as the city enables controversial algorithms to crawl CCTV footage of transport stations looking for threats.

After training its algorithms on both open source and synthetic data, Wintics’ systems have been adapted to, for example, count the number of people in a crowd or the number of people falling to the floor—alerting operators once the number exceeds a certain threshold.

Houllier argues that his algorithms are a privacy-friendly alternative to controversial facial recognition systems used by past global sporting events, such as the 2022 Qatar World Cup. “Here we are trying to find another way,” he says. To him, letting the algorithms crawl CCTV footage is a way to ensure the event is safe without jeopardizing personal freedoms. “We are not analyzing any personal data. We are just looking at shapes, no face, no license plate recognition, no behavioral analytics.”

Levain is concerned the AI surveillance systems will remain in France long after the athletes leave. To her, these algorithms enable the police and security services to impose surveillance on wider stretches of the city. “This technology will reproduce the stereotypes of the police,” she says. “We know that they discriminate. We know that they always go in the same area. They always go and harass the same people. And this technology, as with every surveillance technology, will help them do that.”

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15196046

Linked article is about Pennsylvania, but note that Cornell recently announced these lanternflies have invaded the New York grape-growing region of the Finger Lakes: https://cals.cornell.edu/news/2024/07/spotted-lanternfly-found-finger-lakes-region

Also, they are up in Connecticut now: https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2024-07-25/spotted-lanternfly-connecticut-grapes-crops

Researchers from Pennsylvania State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences used an economic assessment software program to estimate potential damage and said in the worst-case scenario the damage could climb to half a billion dollars annually.

“I mean, look, it made it to Pennsylvania from China in one shot,” Walsh said. Lanternflies invaded the U.S. attached to a stone shipment sent to a local landscaping company.

“The reality is that some of those assumptions have not played out as predicted. Far and away, lanternflies are not the fire and brimstone, doom and gloom situation that they were originally feared to be,” Walsh said. “Except for grapes — it’s been worse than expected for grapes.”

While extremely disruptive to the wine and grape industry, the spotted lanternfly is not as damaging to hardwood trees used for timber as previously thought, according to 2023 research from Penn State’s Entomology Department.

According to Penn State researchers, the heaviest hit vineyards lost up to 90% of their grapevines.

Grape growers can’t just immediately replace a grapevine either. Creato said it takes up to three years for grapevines to bear fruit and five to seven years to be ready for wine.

Walsh said there is a trend of lanternflies arriving in an area, growing in numbers rapidly for a few years, and then declining for another few years. “But in that sigh of relief, the question is then, ‘Why?’” he said.

“It’s a complex bug that still has lots of secrets that we’re slowly working out,” Walsh said. “Everyday citizens reporting back information and doing the ‘lanternfly stomp’ as they went about their daily travels absolutely had a positive effect in slowing the spread.”

Linked article is about Pennsylvania, but note that Cornell recently announced these lanternflies have invaded the New York grape-growing region of the Finger Lakes: https://cals.cornell.edu/news/2024/07/spotted-lanternfly-found-finger-lakes-region

Also, they are up in Connecticut now: https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2024-07-25/spotted-lanternfly-connecticut-grapes-crops

Researchers from Pennsylvania State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences used an economic assessment software program to estimate potential damage and said in the worst-case scenario the damage could climb to half a billion dollars annually.

“I mean, look, it made it to Pennsylvania from China in one shot,” Walsh said. Lanternflies invaded the U.S. attached to a stone shipment sent to a local landscaping company.

“The reality is that some of those assumptions have not played out as predicted. Far and away, lanternflies are not the fire and brimstone, doom and gloom situation that they were originally feared to be,” Walsh said. “Except for grapes — it’s been worse than expected for grapes.”

While extremely disruptive to the wine and grape industry, the spotted lanternfly is not as damaging to hardwood trees used for timber as previously thought, according to 2023 research from Penn State’s Entomology Department.

According to Penn State researchers, the heaviest hit vineyards lost up to 90% of their grapevines.

Grape growers can’t just immediately replace a grapevine either. Creato said it takes up to three years for grapevines to bear fruit and five to seven years to be ready for wine.

Walsh said there is a trend of lanternflies arriving in an area, growing in numbers rapidly for a few years, and then declining for another few years. “But in that sigh of relief, the question is then, ‘Why?’” he said.

“It’s a complex bug that still has lots of secrets that we’re slowly working out,” Walsh said. “Everyday citizens reporting back information and doing the ‘lanternfly stomp’ as they went about their daily travels absolutely had a positive effect in slowing the spread.”

At issue in the case is the Web and App Activity toggle in Android device’s settings. Turning the toggle off prevents future web and app activity being saved to a user’s Google account.

The class plaintiffs, a suit first filed in 2020, claim that Google collected their personalized data even though they turned the toggle off. They claim the toggle gives users the false impression that they can “opt out” of sharing all data with Google and third-party developers, and accused Google of invasion of privacy.

Santacana said that none of the data that Google collected could be tied back to a user and that the defendants had failed to include a single example of the data being tracked back to a user, being used for personalized advertisements or being used to build marketing profiles.

Seeborg, a Barack Obama appointee, told Santacana that he thought the language in Google’s privacy policy could possibly mislead a reasonable consumer into believing that toggling the function off stops collection of all data.

Santacana replied that it’s not Google’s fault if a user doesn’t interpret the policies correctly.

David Boies, counsel for the class plaintiffs, told Seeborg that he didn’t believe that Google doesn’t collect personal information, and that even the non-personal information could identify a person’s mobile device and be linked to a specific individual.

Boies read Seeborg copies of Google employees’ internal emails, in which multiple employees expressed that they felt the privacy policy was fooling users into thinking that personal information wasn’t being collected. In the emails, the Google employees also said they were collecting and using personal information.

Seeborg took the matter under submission.

A tiny native rodent that was on the brink of extinction on the mainland has bounced back in the most unlikely of places — an island infested with death adders and tiger snakes.

The rat's survival on the South Australian island, which it was introduced to more than three decades ago, has been the result of one of Australia's worst invasive weeds, the African boxthorn.

Co-author of the study, Flinders University associate professor Vera Weisbecker, said invasive weeds were damaging to Australia's biodiversity so it was good news a threatened mammal was thriving in that habitat.

However the researchers cautioned against perceptions that invasive weeds weren't as bad as they seemed.

"We completely agree that it is a damaging weed that needs to be controlled," Ms Kraehe said.

"If it continues to spread, it may displace too much of the native vegetation and lead to a collapse of the island's ecosystem, ultimately affecting the greater stick-nest rats themselves," Dr Hill said.

From BBC:

• A series of fires has hit French high-speed rail lines, hours before the Paris Olympics opening ceremony
• Rail company SNCF says it's a "massive attack aimed at paralysing the network"; France's transport minister condemns the "co-ordinated malicious acts"
• Some 800,000 customers will be affected with disruption expected all weekend, the rail firm says
• Eurostar tells customers to postpone trips if they can, as it faces ongoing disruption

See also:

• https://apnews.com/live/olympics-opening-ceremony-2024-updates
• https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/vandals-target-frances-high-speed-rail-network-olympics-get-underway-2024-07-26/
• https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-26/france-s-high-speed-rail-network-disrupted-by-arson/104148714

• Step 1: Declaration of Intent to Run: process will remain open until 6 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, July 27
• Step 2: Obtaining Delegate Support: candidates will have until Tuesday, July 30 to obtain support of enough delegates to demonstrate viability of their campaigns
• Step 3: Vote to Determine Nominee: Any candidate who obtains the signatures of at least 300 delegates will be eligible for the virtual roll call vote, which is currently scheduled to take place on Thursday, Aug. 1.
• Step 4: Choosing Candidate’s Running Mate: After the nominee is officially chosen, they will have the task of identifying their vice-presidential nominee no later than Aug. 7.

According to the Rules Committee, that nominee will be made official by the DNC chair.

Both candidates on the ticket will be present at the DNC in Chicago for a ceremonial vote showing support for their spot atop the ballot, though delegates will still get a chance to vote on the party’s official platform.

Today, 7-Eleven's new owners, SEJ Asset Management & Investment Company — owned by Seven-Eleven Japan Co., Ltd — feel the company's U.S. locations need a makeover.

The company said some U.S. locations will soon have a significant change in their look, feel and product offerings, along with a rebranding that includes a certain Japanese flair.

Some customers could see much more of an emphasis on fresh sandwiches, fried chicken, sushi, and desserts in the menu offerings, too, rather than things like hot dogs and slurpees

... sushi?

C'mon Japan, you think Americans are going to trust raw fish 7-11 sushi?

archive | Excerpts with [clarifying bracketed text that is not from source]

many of the private ventures have repeatedly and, authorities say, illegally laid claim to publicly protected lands, generating enormous profits from territory they have no legal right to and then failing to share the revenue with those who protected or lived on the land. The use of such lands to sell credits also contributes little to reducing carbon emissions.

• The Post’s investigation is based on a review of thousands of pages of corporate and court records, interviews with dozens of people across the forest, and a geospatial analysis of carbon credit projects in the Amazon.

• The Post analysis found no evidence that the purchasers acted improperly.

• when polluting companies buy credits generated by supposedly preserving land that was already protected, their money contributes next to nothing.

“The system is very gameable,” said Joseph Romm, a climate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “And the victim is the planet, and all of humanity who suffers because we’re not reducing emissions, but get to pretend we are.”

• So Barreto, often working on the case until 10 p.m., tracked down the deeds that appeared to show the lands were private, finding 34 in all.

• Almost none of the deeds were valid.

• Morioka began buying vast tracts of land in Portel. But [...] Morioka had never received the official authorizations he’d needed for the acquisitions, rendering them invalid.

• That didn’t stop several deals from being struck by Morioka in the early 2010s, effectively leasing the lands to carbon credit developers

• One person appeared to have had a hand in every one of the projects she [Barreto] reviewed. “Michael Greene,” she said.

• In the absence of government approval, companies like Greene’s have no right to carbon credits associated with Indigenous territories

• [alternate view] Funai, the government’s Indigenous affairs agency, announced last year that the federal government, lacking a system of regulation, could not authorize deals involving Indigenous lands.

Still, Indigenous Carbon proceeded, reaping a windfall of carbon credits. And it did so by telling Cercarbono that the ventures had been the villagers’ idea. Greene’s company was only a consultant. But six former employees said Indigenous Carbon had been far more than a consultant — entering the territories, paying leaders to participate in unauthorized carbon credit deals and then seeking to conceal the company’s involvement.

“Have the leaders tell their people that they sought a company and contracted it to consult them on how to do the project,” Greene wrote to one employee in June 2022 in one of several WhatsApp messages reviewed by The Post. “Not that they were approached.”

“They need to say, ‘We did the project, without the help of a white man coming to our land,’” he wrote in another message in December 2022.

By late last year, an Indian firm hired by Greene verified six of the projects. Cercarbono then certified them all. They were allotted roughly 24 million credits, records show, worth $197 million at last year’s prices.

archive | (Science publishing date: 30 May 2024)

A mere 2000 or so “supersharers” spread 80% of content from fake news sites in a sample of more than 600,000 U.S. voters on X (formerly Twitter), according to an analysis published today in Science. The posters were more likely to be women and older—challenging the stereotype of social media manipulators as young, alt-right men—and they had a huge reach: More than one in 20 users in the data set followed at least one of these supersharers.

“It does not seem like supersharing is a one-off attempt to influence elections by tech-savvy individuals,” Grinberg adds, “but rather a longer term corrosive socio-technical process that contaminates the information ecosystem for some part of society.”

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15160546 | ghost archive | Excerpts:

... findings with null or negative results — those that fail to find a relationship between variables or groups, or that go against the preconceived hypothesis — gather dust in favour of studies with positive or significant findings. A 2022 survey of scientists in France, for instance, found that 75% were willing to publish null results they had produced, but only 12.5% were able to do so2. Over time, this bias in publications distorts the scientific record, and a focus on significant results can encourage researchers to selectively report their data or exaggerate the statistical importance of their findings. It also wastes time and money, because researchers might duplicate studies that had already been conducted but not published. Some evidence suggests that the problem is getting worse, with fewer negative results seeing the light of day3 over time.

At the crux of both academic misconduct and publication bias is the same ‘publish or perish’ culture, perpetuated by academic institutions, research funders, scholarly journals and scientists themselves, that rewards researchers when they publish findings in prestigious venues, Scheel says.

But these academic gatekeepers have biases, say some critics, who argue that funders and top-tier journals often crave novelty and attention-grabbing findings. Journal editors worry that pages full of null results will attract fewer readers, says Simine Vazire, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia and editor of the journal Psychological Science.

One of the most significant changes to come out of the replication crisis is the expansion of preregistration (see ‘Registrations on the rise’), in which researchers must state their hypothesis and the outcomes they intend to measure in a public database at the outset of their study (this is already the norm in clinical trials). ... Preliminary data look promising: when Scheel and her colleagues compared the results of 71 registered reports with a random sample of 152 standard psychology manuscripts, they found that 44% of the registered reports had positive results, compared with 96% of the standard publications^7^ (see ‘Intent to publish’). And Nosek and his colleagues found that reviewers scored psychology and neuroscience registered reports higher on metrics of research rigour and quality compared with papers published under the standard model^8^.