https://www.instagram.com/salvjiia/?hl=uk

Via https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/style/ugly-pictures-on-instagram.html

When we worry about free speech, we mostly worry about governments suppressing speech, not private actors. It’s one thing to say that the US government shouldn’t have the ability to arbitrarily censor some speech, but it’s another altogether to say, that, for example, Boing Boing shouldn’t be able to kick jerks off its message boards — that has as much to do with “compelled publication” as it does with “free speech.”

But that’s not the end of the story, because the world isn’t composed of the giant governments of the world, controlling massive public spheres in which civic discourse is transacted, and millions of small private spaces of relatively equal standing, where conversations also take place.

Instead, our online world has almost no public spaces — that is, spaces for discourse that are controlled by the US government and subject to First Amendment protection — and a tiny handful of incredibly large, powerful companies control the vast majority of our civic discourse online. These companies operate “at scale” which means that they have a very low ratio of customer-service reps to users, and that means that nearly all of their decisions about who can speak, and what can be said, are made in secret, often by algorithms, with no appeal and no way to even get a human to explain what’s happened to you.

That’s why it’s worrying that Facebook and Twitter have (for example) purged millions of “bots” (who sometimes weren’t bots) and “extremists” (who were sometimes just people who were discussing or opposing extremism) and “inauthentic content” (which was sometimes very authentic indeed).

Not because this violates the First Amendment, and not because the strict First Amendment rules should necessarily apply to private actors, even very, very large ones — but because when the majority of our civic discourse is regulated by unaccountable algorithms and unaccountable moderators working for giant monopolistic companies, that has real, inarguable free speech implications.

The reality is that Alex Jones’ exile from the big platforms is significant because, without their backing, his ability to reach his audience will be very severely curtailed. That’s OK with me as a kind of utilitarian matter, because Jones is a terrible person who victimized some of the most traumatized people in America, families of murdered children, in order to sell quack vitamin supplements. So, yeah, fuck that guy.

But the very significance of this should be a wake-up call to all of us. Because, of course, rich and powerful people are better at navigating the rules of the big platforms than random users — or, more to the point, marginalized, at risk people.

Just look at Cambodia, where the local brutal dictator has mastered the rules of Facebook that are supposed to prevent harassment by forcing users to go by their real names. In Cambodia, dissidents have two choices: go by their real names on the platforms and risk being arrested and tortured, or stay silent. There just isn’t any way to reach the Cambodian population if you aren’t on Facebook, and the local autocrat will get you booted from Facebook if you don’t use your real name.

Which means that even if Facebook’s censorship isn’t a legal problem, it’s surely a moral one.

https://boingboing.net/2018/08/08/size-matters.html

1. Beauty is fleeting, power is vulnerable. I will not risk the latter for the former.
2. I will use my magic mirror for spying on my enemies rather than for vain attempts at preserving my position as fairest in the land.
3. I will not fret over the comparative beauty of the Hero’s True Love or any Beautiful Yet Innocent kinfolk. They may be attractive enough for peasant wenches/quivering maidens; but I am The Evil Empress, and there is no comparison.
4. I will not bed the Hunky Hero before my plan is executed, unless having him believe I am carrying his child gives me a decisive advantage.
5. While seduction has its place in my vast arsenal, I realize that “evil” and “skanky” are not mutually inclusive. Royal Dressmakers unable to realize this fact will be flayed alive in the presence of their replacements.
6. I will wear flats, or better yet, running shoes when executing crucial plans.
7. My slinky sorceress’ robe will have a chain mail foundation garment, at minimum.
8. I will not be put off by the Hero’s rebuffs of my sensual advances. If he doesn’t succumb to me, I will not fly into a jealous rage. Instead, I’ll shrug my shoulders, send him on his way, and have him picked off as he exits the fortress.
9. Where winks, suggestive remarks, and body language won’t get me what I want, a well aimed semi-automatic will.

Many, many more following the above.

http://nift.firedrake.org/EEmpress.htm

As you might know, most languages and cultures have swear words (or as we from the South like to call them, cuss words). There are lots of reasons people swear, we usually start off being shocking, and after a while it just becomes habit. Like the great Yoda once sort of kind of said “being shocking lets of steam, letting you might know, most languages and cultures have swear words (or as we from the South like to call them, cuss words). There are lots of reasons people swear, we usually start off being shocking, and after a while it just becomes habit. Like the great Yoda once sort of kind of said “being shocking lets of steam, letting off steam leads to habit, and habit…leads to Physioprof”.

But there’s no denying that swearing is usually deemed inappropriate for at least some kinds of society (like, you know, 5 year olds, your grandmother, etc). So people wonder what USE swearing has in certain contexts. Like, say, in pain. Why do people swear when they are in pain? Whatever happened to “ouch”? Or “AAAAARRRRRGHHHHHH”.

Well, these authors hypothesized that swearing as related to pain was actually a maladaptive response, one that occurred because, at the time of the pain, negative thoughts and emotions come to the fore. So they thought that swearing while someone was in pain would make the perception of the pain worse, making people more intolerant to pain. But of course, being scientists, you have to TEST it first.

So they…

http://scicurious.scientopia.org/2010/10/15/friday-weird-science-that-motherfking-hurts/

Last week, FiveThirtyEight published nearly 3 million tweets sent by handles affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll factory.” That group was a defendant in one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments, which accused the IRA of interfering with American electoral and political processes.

[…]

What follows is a sampling of reader projects that came to my attention via Twitter (where else?) and email. The projects reinforce and expand upon the Clemson researchers’ initial finding: The trolls were engaged in a sophisticated and intricate Russian assault on the political debate in America and several other countries. It was an assault waged both before and after the 2016 presidential election — and an assault that appears to continue, at least in some form, to this day.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-you-found-in-3-million-russian-troll-tweets/

Zuckerberg explained that when they come across content that contains Holocaust denial, they essentially remove it from all promotional algorithms to curb it’s spreading on the platform.

As a free-speech absolutist (please don’t mistake me for a constitutional originalist, I am not), I found the reaction extremely disturbing. Rather than seeing Twitter explode with conversations about the potential dangers of social network CEOs deciding what speech to promote and what not to, there was an outcry that Zuckerberg wasn’t doing enough to censor ‘fake news’.

The words extremely disturbing above might read as hyperbolic, especially in this particular context of censoring abhorrent, easily falsifiable claims like ‘the Holocaust didn’t happen’. But I don’t think are, decisions like this one by Facebook to censor Holocaust denial set a precedent that normalizes behavior (censorship) that can be used it far less benign in the future.

Make no mistake, I think fake news is a problem on Facebook and they do need to measures to prevent falsehoods from rapidly spreading and influencing elections, but I don’t think this is the answer.

You might think this precedent isn’t a big deal. It is censorship of things we almost universally agree to be false and damaging, so would a social network ever censor important, less controversial opinions? Things that, might actually be true? Well, we don’t even need to think up a hypothetical future situation —this is already happening on YouTube. That’s what makes this really scary.

Source: Stop begging social network CEOs for censorship – Sam – Medium

British sculptor Debbie Lawson works in the space between two and three dimensions, forming wild animals that emerge from old-fashioned rugs. The artist builds her animals from scratch, using chicken wire and masking tape, and then covers them with identical or near-identical Persian carpets to create the illusion that the creature is fused with the hanging rug.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/08/life-size-animals-emerge-from-persian-rugs-in-perception-defying-sculptures-by-debbie-lawson/

I’m nearly certain that I just saw a fox run across the street from my neighbor’s yard. It made my night; I hadn’t seen a fox in Asheville in maybe a decade. I start a new job on Monday, so I’m having fun imagining it to be an omen, and thinking about what foxes can signify…

Huh. Maybe?

Look at county-level maps of almost any closely contested presidential race in our history, and you see much the same fault lines: the swaths of the country first colonized by the early Puritans and their descendants — Yankeedom — tend to vote as one, and against the party in favor in the sections first colonized by the culture laid down by the Barbados slave lords who founded Charleston, S.C., or the Scots-Irish frontiersmen who swept down the Appalachian highlands and on into the Hill Country of Texas, Oklahoma and the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri.

The Quaker-founded Midlands, the swing region of American politics that makes up a great swath of the heartland, has often been the physical and political buffer between rival regional coalitions, its pluralistic, community-oriented culture at peace neither with the Yankee’s utopian drive to engineer social improvements nor Southern culture’s emphasis on individual freedom above all else. It played the kingmaker’s role again in 2016.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opinion/urban-rural-united-states-regions-midterms.html

Given social psychology’s poor track record on statistical techniques and research methods, I’m pretty skeptical. But this is an interesting idea:

The field of social psychology has recently embraced a psychophysical technique called “reverse correlation” that aims to do just that: To provide visual proxies of the content of mental representations. The reverse correlation method (or the “classification image technique”, as it has also been called) is a data-driven method that originated in the field of psychophysics and has its roots in signal detection theory and auditory perceptionp In signal detection paradigms, participants see stimuli that sometimes contain signal, and always contain noise. They respond to the presence of signal and their accuracy is computed based on their hits (correctly detecting the signal) and false alarms (mistakenly responding that signal was present). False alarms are particularly interesting cases, because participants might see signal in noise. The noise just happens to match the expected signal to some degree. Reverse correlation was invented to identify those features of the noise that trigger false alarms. Contemporary reverse correlation paradigms are essentially signal detection paradigms, but consist of stimuli for which the intended signal is not specified by the experimenter. The stimulus set is random and it is the participant who decides whether signal is present in a stimulus or not. This is why the technique is called “reverse correlation”: Tthe standard procedure where an experimenter specifies signal in stimuli for participants to identify is reversed.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10463283.2017.1381469