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Daily Archives: May 5, 2019

Study: Major media outlets’ Twitter accounts amplify false Trump claims on average 19 times a day

Media Matters: “Major media outlets failed to rebut President Donald Trump’s misinformation 65% of the time in their tweets about his false or misleading comments, according to a Media Matters review. That means the outlets amplified Trump’s misinformation more than 400 times over the three-week period of the study — a rate of 19 per day. The data shows that news outlets are still failing to grapple with a major problem that media critics highlighted during the Trump transition: When journalists apply their traditional method of crafting headlines, tweets, and other social media posts to Trump, they end up passively spreading misinformation by uncritically repeating his falsehoods. The way people consume information in the digital age makes the accuracy of a news outlet’s headlines and social media posts more important than ever, because research shows they are the only thing a majority of people actually read. But journalists are trained to treat a politician’s statements as intrinsically newsworthy, often quoting them without context in tweets and headlines and addressing whether the statement was accurate only in the body of the piece, if at all. When the politician’s statements are false, journalists who quote them in headlines and on social media without context end up amplifying the falsehoods…”

Deloitte, MIT, and Datawheel Launch New ‘Viz Builder’ in Data USA 3.0

Deloitte – Data USA’s 3.0 includes additional data sets, now capable of generating more than 2.5 million data visualizations. ” Today Deloitte, MIT, and Datawheel released the third major update to Data USA, a data visualization platform with more than 400,000 monthly visits. This third update includes a “Viz Builder” tool, which allows users to… Continue Reading

Map identifies companies around the world most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions

The Decolonial Atlas – Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet – “Just 100 companies are responsible for more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The guys who run those companies – and they are mostly guys – have gotten rich on the backs of literally all life… Continue Reading

‘Climate denial’ just made it into the dictionary. Wait, what?

Grist: “The world is on fire, and so is our vocabulary. Merriam-Webster added 640 new words to its online dictionary last week. The additions include swole (“extremely muscular”), new meanings for snowflake (someone who is “treated as unique or special” or “overly sensitive”) and, you guessed it, a whole batch of neologisms tied to the… Continue Reading

The Voluntariness of Voluntary Consent: Consent Searches and the Psychology of Compliance

Sommers, Roseanna and Bohns, Vanessa K., The Voluntariness of Voluntary Consent: Consent Searches and the Psychology of Compliance (April 10, 2019). Yale Law Journal, Vol. 128, No. 7, 2019. Available at SSRN “Consent-based searches are by far the most ubiquitous form of search undertaken by police. A key legal inquiry in these cases is whether… Continue Reading

Who Owns the Law? Why We Must Restore Public Ownership of Legal Publishing

LawAr Xiv – Who Owns the Law? Why We Must Restore Public Ownership of Legal Publishing, 26 J. Intell. Prop. L. 205 (2019). Authors – Leslie Street and David Hansen. Created on April 29, 2019. Last edited. April 30, 2019. Supplemental Materials osf.io/9enzr/ “Each state has its own method for officially publishing the law. This… Continue Reading

Using punctuation to pace and communicate effectively

Oxford University Blog – “…Punctuation-wise, most of us fall between these two extremes. We are neither staccato nor breathless. Instead, we use punctuation to establish a comfortable pace for readers by grouping and emphasizing certain chunks of information. And as we edit our own work, from first to final draft, we see how small differences… Continue Reading

History of commercial audiobook is one small window on evolution of ethic of efficiency

The Baffler: “…Audible is an arm of this effort. Audiobooks are the fastest growing part of publishing, “a tiny bright spot” for the industry, according to Bloomberg : revenue from downloads has roughly tripled in the last five years and reached $2.5 billion in 2017. But Amazon dominates the audiobook market, mostly through Audible. As… Continue Reading