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Why Snoozing Emails Is a Terrible Idea and What You Should Do Instead

4/30/2018

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Why Snoozing Emails Is a Terrible Idea and What You Should Do Instead

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Did you get the new Gmail update yet? (If not, see if there’s a Try the new Gmail option on the web settings menu.) One of its major new features is the ability to snooze emails, something we’ve seen in various apps (like Inbox) before. We’re here to tell you why snoozing is bad, why you should avoid it, and what to do instead.

What’s wrong with snoozing?

At first, snoozing emails seems like a magic fix for powering through your inbox in record time, but that’s because you’re not actually doing anything much at all—you’re deferring the responsibility of dealing with emails to a later time, for your future self to sort out.

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Sure, you might feel like you’re accomplishing something if you hide away an email until you’ve got time to deal with it, but chances are there are already enough emails hitting your inbox without them circling round twice or even more times. It’s like queueing up articles in a read-it-later service: Good for clearing the decks now, but what about later?

The implementation in the new Gmail on the web is rather nicely done. Hover over a thread, click the clock icon, and you can snooze a message for a day, a week, until the weekend, or until a time and date of your choosing. But what happens when that time comes? The buck has to stop somewhere.

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We can imagine snoozing being handy for messages that you can’t take action on until something else has happened first, so maybe you dismiss an email asking for a report on a meeting until you’ve actually had the meeting. But snoozing emails just to get to inbox zero faster isn’t productive at all—in fact it’s less productive, because you’ve got the extra step of deciding when you want the email to return, before you finally deal with it.

What to do instead

Some 40 years after we first started emailing each other, we’re still waiting on a magic formula to deal with email overload—there’s no quick fix here, but there are techniques and tools that can help. Gmail itself has a bunch of useful features, both old and new, that can prove to be far more effective than snoozing messages.

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To begin with, make sure you’ve set up Gmail tabs so Google’s algorithms can keep the least important messages away from your primary inbox. Click the cog icon (top right) then Configure Inbox to enable the tabs you want to see. You might still get hit by a deluge of email, but at least it’ll be neatly sorted, and you’ll have a better idea about what can be ignored.

If Gmail gets it wrong, drag emails between tabs (or select an email then click the Move button at the top). You can also select an email, click the More menu (three vertical dots) then choose Mark as important from the pop-up list to tell Gmail about the messages that you really care about.

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Depending on the amount and type of email you get, filtering important messages into your primary tab rather than filtering unimportant messages out can often be more effective. Gmail has of course had filters for ages but setting up dozens of them to fit any given scenario can be daunting.

Try starting small with the emails most vital to you or your work. Open an important email, click the More menu (three vertical dots to the right), then Filter messages like this to create a filter that always marks similar messages as important. You can also create filters from any Gmail search using the drop-down menu underneath the search box.

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You don’t want to waste hours creating endless filters but you can easily set up a handful of ones that cover emails coming in from your work domain—“from:(@gizmodo.com)” for example—or from your bank. If your closest friends haven’t yet moved to contacting you on messaging apps, you can add them too.

One of the biggest improvements you can make to your email workflow is enabling keyboard shortcuts. Click the cog icon (top right), then choose Settings, General, and Keyboard shortcuts on. You’ll soon be powering through your messages on muscle memory alone.

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Just as shortcuts can save you time in Photoshop or anywhere else, they can do the same in Gmail. You can mass select messages by clicking the first then using a Shift+Click on the last, or by using the Select all tick box in the top left-hand corner. You can use E to archive messages, Shift+I to mark them as read, and + or = to mark them as important. With the square [ and ] brackets you can archive an open message and move forward or backward to the next one automatically.

Cutting down the email at source is often more effective than you think it might be too—Gmail has long had an Unsubscribe link at the top of newsletters you can use to stop them from cluttering up your inbox, and in the new Gmail on mobile this is going to appear more prominently.

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Also new in the Gmail mobile updates: The option to only get notifications for important messages, which ties in with what we’ve already talked about. Both these new features on Android and iOS should make managing your messages easier without you having to really do anything different.

Other angles worth exploring are those strategies that don’t really have anything to do with your email program, or filters, or snoozing. Motherboard’s Jason Koebler recommends writing down email-related jobs rather than keeping your inbox open all day, for example. You can also pause emails in Gmail (and Outlook using Boomerang), which puts you more in control of your time.

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And that’s the inherent problem with too much email—it often has us dancing to its tune rather than the other way around. Putting down limits for what times you deal with it and how long those windows are has proved useful for plenty of people... just don’t be tempted to hit that snooze button.





Digital Trends

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

April 30, 2018 at 09:12AM
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Michelle Pfeiffer Could Go Up Against Angelina Jolie in the MaleficentSequel

4/30/2018

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Michelle Pfeiffer Could Go Up Against Angelina Jolie in the Maleficent Sequel

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Angelina Jolie’s CG-enhanced cheekbones in Maleficent will never not be creepy.
Image: Walt Disney Studios

We’ve officially entered the era of nothing but teases for how important the Avengers 4 official title is. Paul Feig still wants to do a sequel to his Ghostbusters movie. An unlikely source reveals another Deadpool 2 character. Plus, more footage from Solo: A Star Wars Story and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Spoilers, away!

Maleficent 2

Variety reports Michelle Pfeiffer is in talks to play a major role in the sequel. If a deal is reached, she’ll play a currently-mysterious Queen.


The MCU

In an interview with the Associated Press, Kevin Feige revealed he’s already had meetings for MCU films not expected to see release until the year 2025. Because when you’re breaking box office records left and right, the ride never stops.

We’re always thinking ahead. Just when people think they can pin us down, we go somewhere else and that’s going to happen again after Infinity War in the build-up to the next Avengers film. And we had meetings earlier today about 2024 and 2025.


Avengers 4

Speaking with Bustle, Anthony Russo stated the secret title of Avengers 4 “speaks to the heart of the story.”

We do have a name for it, we’re just not announcing it. And I think we came to that name fairly early in the development process. It speaks to the heart of the story.


Annabelle 3

According to Entertainment Weekly, Annabelle writer Gary Dauberman is set to make his directorial debut with a third movie in the popular haunted doll franchise.


Ghostbusters 2

In an interview with Yahoo! Movies, Paul Feig stated he’s still interested in making a sequel to Ghostbusters: Answer the Call.

We would love to; it’s really up to the studio to want to do it. We had so much fun making that movie. The movie’s just really built an audience in the two years since it’s been out. I get contacted every day by people who are such fans of it, and so many women who are inspired by seeing women in science. I will go to my grave so proud of that movie, and so proud of what that cast did in that film.


Deadpool 2

Peter W., the breakout character from the Deadpool 2 trailer (who may or may not be comic book secret agent Pete Wisdom), has been tweeting photos of fellow X-Force members Domino, Bedlam, and Shatterstar, as well as debuting Bill Skarsgård as the acid-spitting mutant, Zeitgeist.

Deadpool also made a surprise appearance on Hugh Jackman’s Twitter feed, as he is wont to do.


Incredibles 2

There’s a ton of new footage in the recently released Japanese-dub trailer.


Solo: A Star Wars Story

Lando invites you to buckle up in the latest TV spot.


Hereditary

Toni Collette loses her cool in the new TV spot for Hereditary.


Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

“Genetic power has been unleashed,” according to Dr. Ian Malcolm in the latest TV spot.



Titans

Heroic Hollywood reports actress Conor Leslie has been cast in the role of Donna Troy/Wonder Girl.

Elsewhere, Minka Kelly posted a set video giving us a new look at Hawk & Dove... albeit with some slight modifications.

We also have the first set photo of Robin in full costume.


Watchmen

That Hashtag Show has casting calls for characters named Looking Glass, Panda, and Pirate Jenny, among others.

Angela Abraham: African-American female cop. Independent and intelligent, she’s also a realist. She’s married to Cal, with whom she has a daughter and is fiercely protective of them both.

Cal Abraham: African-American male who is the stay-at-home husband of Angela. While he seems at home as the king of his castle and being a loving husband and father, it’s clear his past has a different story to tell.

Looking Glass: A good looking cop, the native Oklahoman isn’t simple as his rural accent makes him appear to be. A top interrogator and behavioral scientist, he may also be a bit of a sociopath.

Panda: An ethnic desk cop, he’s cynical and tough and puts his job first. Not a friend to many, he uses comedy to keep people at bay.

Red Scare: Mafioso, track suit wearing cop. His Russian accent lends to his abrasiveness.

Pirate Jenny: An androgynous and lustful bisexual cop, Jenny is an anarchist at heart.

Jane Crawford: The wife of the police chief, Judd, Jane is a veterinarian who’s sharper than her guarded persona lets on.

Old Man: A former cop who is still an imposing figure despite his age.


Agents of SHIELD

Adrian Pasdar goes full Graviton in the trailer for this week’s episode, “The One Who Will Save Us All.”


Arrow

The late Tommy Merlyn drops in on Oliver’s trial in pictures from this week’s episode, “Docket No. 11-19-41-73.” More available at TV Line.


Once Upon a Time

True love’s kiss turns out to be a total bust in the trailer for the penultimate episode of Once Upon a Time, “Is This Henry Mills?”


Westworld

A tiger stalks the park in the trailer for next week’s episode, “Survival.”


Fear the Walking Dead

Madison declines an offer for a weenie in the trailer for next week’s episode, “Buried,” which also sees a unique-looking zombie with a face full of porcupine quills.


The 100

The CW talks to Marie Avergeropouos about Octavia’s development in season five.


Stranger Things

Finally, a new video reveals season three of Stranger Things is now in production.


Banner art by Jim Cooke.





Digital Trends

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

April 30, 2018 at 09:12AM
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Twitter also sold data access to Cambridge Analytica researcher

4/30/2018

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Twitter also sold data access to Cambridge Analytica researcher

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Since it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the personal data of millions of Facebook users, one question has lingered in the minds of the public: What other data did Dr. Aleksandr Kogan gain access to?

Twitter confirmed to The Telegraph on Saturday that GSR, Kogan’s own commercial enterprise, had purchased one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period between December 2014 and April 2015. Twitter told Bloomberg that, following an internal review, the company did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter.

Twitter sells API access to large organizations or enterprises for the purposes of surveying sentiment or opinion during various events, or around certain topics or ideas.

Here’s what a Twitter spokesperson said to The Telegraph:

Twitter has also made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned and operated by Cambridge Analytica. This decision is based on our determination that Cambridge Analytica operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices. Cambridge Analytica may remain an organic user on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules.

Obviously, this doesn’t have the same scope as the data harvested about users on Facebook. Twitter’s data on users is far less personal. Location on the platform is opt-in and generic at that, and users are not forced to use their real name on the platform.

Still, it shows just how broad the Cambridge Analytica data collection was ahead of the 2016 election.

We reached out to Twitter and will update when we hear back.





Digital Trends

via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com

April 30, 2018 at 08:55AM
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Huawei's Triple Camera P20 Pro Is Too Cool for America

4/30/2018

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Huawei's Triple Camera P20 Pro Is Too Cool for America

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Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

Despite having sold its phones here for years, 2018 was supposed to be Huawei’s big coming out party in the U.S. At CES, I sat through a presentation about how Huawei was expanding into home wifi and had even signed Wonder Woman herself as the company’s new brand ambassador.

P20 Pro

Price

900 euros (or about $1,100)

What is it

A expensive flagship phone with three rear cameras

Like

Gorgeous design, fantastic battery life, and it captures the best pics you can get from a smartphone yet

Don’t Like

No wireless charging or headphone jack, isn’t available in the US

But then AT&T, Verizon, and Best Buy all backed out of or canceled deals to carry the company’s phones in retail stores; all while Huawei faced even greater pressure from U.S. intelligence. That left Huawei’s latest flagship phone—the P20 Pro—in a weird place, because instead of potentially being the first P-series phone to get sold in America, we’re left watching it thrive overseas with no hopes of a stateside release. And that’s a damn shame, because with a gorgeous design and an innovative triple camera setup, the P20 Pro is actually a pretty great device.

Even just looking at the specs, you can see where Huawei made a lot of smart decisions. Featuring a Kirin 970 processor, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage as standard. (There’s no microSD expandability, but who really cares these days.) Meanwhile the dual SIM tray is a boon for frequent travelers. But P20 Pro’s real treat is its giant 4,000 mAh battery. On our battery rundown test, the P20 Pro lasted 11 hours and 36 minutes. That’s better than even the Pixel 2 XL (11:17), though still slightly short of the S9+’s time of 12:27, which remains the best time we’ve recorded yet this year.

Then there are other little things like the IR blaster embedded in the top edge of the device, which is feature that used to be quite common, but almost every phone maker has long abandoned. And as you’d expect from a phone of this caliber and price, you get IP67 water-resistance and some pleasantly powerful stereo speakers.

That said, the P20 Pro still has two big sticking points: the lack of a headphone jack and wireless charging. Being forced to use USB audio is something you can mull over yourself, you can either deal with it or you can’t. But no wireless charging is a strange omission considering the phone’s 900 euro price tag, which translates to around $1,100. Unlike last year’s P10, whose metal back made it difficult for the phone to play nice with wireless charging tech, the P20’s back is a big sheet of glass. For a phone this expensive, there’s really no excuse.

You might hate the notch, but you have to admit the P20 Pro is still a damn good looking phone.

From left to right the P20 Pro features a 20-MP monochrome camera, a 40-MP RGB camera, and an 8-MP camera with a 3x optical zoom.

1 / 7

Perhaps Huawei’s plan was to dazzle users with one of sparkling colors. With an entrancing color shift from green to purple, Huawei’s signatureTwilight paint job looks like nothing else out there. But even in the standard blue of our review unit, the P20 Pro is just as sharp.

Notch or no notch, the choice is yours.
Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

Now I know some people might take issue with Huawei’s use of a notch, but there really isn’t anything to complain about. Out of the box, the cut out for the P20 Pro 20-MP front-facing camera is pretty obvious. But if you’re not a fan, there’s an option in the display settings to mask the notch with black bars on either side. This gives you the ability to see your notifications and time, date, and battery like you would normally, but without having something protruding into the screen, and in my opinion, it’s the best blend of form and function.

From left to right, you’re looking at the P20 Pro’s 20-MP monochrome camera, a 40-MP RGB camera, and an 8-MP camera with a 3x optical zoom.
Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

But enough with all the dilly dallying, how bout those cameras? Sporting a 20-MP black-and-white camera, a massive 40-MP RGB camera, and a 8-MP camera with a 3X zoom, Huawei’s world-first camera arrangement has something for everyone.

In a contest of black-and-white shots, the P20 Pro wins hands down. (Click to see full resolution.)
Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

Using the monochrome cam, even on something as simple as a black and white photo, the P20 Pro easily out shot the Galaxy S9 in gray scale mode. Frankly, it’s not even close, as the P20 Pro’s captured much better details and sharper edges versus the complete oversaturation seen in the S9’s pic. And these abilities aren’t relegated just to black-and-white shots either.

When using the 40-MP RGB camera, which is what the phone relies on most of the time, the P20 Pro uses the monochrome camera to help capture fine details, while the 40-MP camera concentrates on colors and everything else. On top of that, the P20 Pro’s 40-MP sensor uses a quad bayer filter which creates groups of four pixels and essentially combines them into one giant pixel, which lets the camera soak up a ton of light. So in the end, the phone spits out pictures that are just 10-MP in resolution, which are just slightly smaller than the 12-MP rear cameras in Pixel 2 XL and Galaxy S9, but not by much. And what you get in exchange for the loss in overall resolution is totally worth it.

Even though the P20 Pro’s pic has less megapixels, it still looks sharper.
Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

Just take a look at how the S9 and P20 Pro snapped a pic of some plums. The S9’s shot isn’t bad, but the P20 Pro’s pic has it beat it almost every single way: sharpness, color, detail, you name it. The most obvious example is when you zoom in to look at the labels on the fruit. The barcode and lettering in the S9’s photo looks a little fuzzy, while in the P20 Pro’s pic, lines are bold and crisp. Now I must point out that the P20 Pro’s pic is probably a little oversharpened, but it still beats the S9’s version hands down.

In standard auto mode, the P20 Pro’s low-light skills fared well against the Galaxy S9.
Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

And in low-light things get even better, because that quad bayer arrangement lets the P20 Pro hang with the S9, despite having a smaller f/1.7 aperture compared to the S9’s industry-leading f/1.5 iris.

When you turn on the P20 Pro’s advanced night mode, low-light photos look really impressive.
Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

But then, Huawei went the extra step and created an incredible low-light mode that captures four-second long-exposure shots that can be taken even while hand held. That’s right, no tripod needed. Now normally, this would cause streaks all over the place (and if people move around too fast, you still get a little motion blur), but on the P20 Pro, you get a sort of specialized nighttime HDR shots that often look shockingly good.

The extra level of reach you get with the P20 Pro is a nice bonus.
Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

Finally, there’s that 8-MP camera with a 3x optical zoom, which is 1x more than what you get on the iPhone X or Galaxy S9. So when you need that little extra reach, like say when you’re at a ballgame or concert, the P20 Pro has got you covered there too.

However, the P20 Pro’s cameras aren’t without their flaws. Like the Mate 10 Pro. the P20 Pro has the ability to use object recognition to identify things like dogs, plants, and food, or scenes like landscape and blue sky, and then use that info to fine tune the camera settings for optimal results. The problem is that it seems in the six moths since Huawei’s last iteration, the company may have pushed its algorithms a little too far.

If you don’t step in and stop the AI, the P20 Pro camera can sometimes get a little too bold.
Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

For example, when I snapped very typical shot of some flowers, the P20 Pro pumped up saturation of greens and yellows to an absurd degree, to the point where the pic almost looks neon. You can also kind of see in the clock photo above, where the blue-sky mode does a little bit too good of a job making those blues stand out. Thankfully, disabling the auto-tuning is as simple as hitting the little “x” next to the object recognition tag in the camera app.

But here’s the real tragedy, Huawei isn’t selling the P20 Pro in the states, and based on pressure from seemingly everly level of the government, there’s almost no chance that will change. In fact, just four months in, it seems Huawei may have already decided to reconsider is expansion into the US, in favor of refocusing its efforts on more welcoming markets like Europe and Asia. That means like all those fancy cheeses made in France and elsewhere, or genuine Kobe beef from Japan, the Huawei P20 Pro is a delicacy only available overseas. That’s pretty depressing, because this is an exciting, innovative phone that gives Apple, Samsung, and Google’s best some actual competition. And the worst part about all this, is that we really only have ourselves to blame.

Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

README

  • The P20 Pro isn’t available in the US, and Huawei has no intentions of bringing it over.
  • While sometimes you have to fiddle around with the settings or veto the aggressive AI, the P20 Pro’s triple cam setup is no joke.
  • Battery life is fantastic, with the P20 Pro lasting over 11.5 hours on our test.
  • Huawei’s EMUI 8 is easy enough to use, but I still don’t think it looks quite right.
  • There’s no headphone jack, wireless charging, or microSD card slot, though there is support for dual SIMs.

SPEC DUMP

EMUI 8.1 running on Android Oreo 8.1 • Kirin 970 processor • 6GB of RAM • 128GB of storage • 6.1-inch 18:9 2240 x 1080 OLED display • 4,000 mAh battery • 24-MP front cam • rear 20-MP monochrome cam • rear 40-MP RGB cam • 8-MP telephoto cam with 3x optical zoom •USB 3.1 Type-C port • NFC • 6.10 x 2.91 x 0.31 inches • 6.35 ounces





Digital Trends

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

April 30, 2018 at 08:48AM
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Watch a Parachuting Skier Take Flight Moments Before an Avalanche Buries Him Alive

4/30/2018

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Watch a Parachuting Skier Take Flight Moments Before an Avalanche Buries Him Alive

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GIF

Downhill skiers hit tremendous speeds as they race down a mountain, but it’s still not fast enough to outrun an avalanche. Fortunately for Maxence Cavalade, the parachute he was using to speedride down Mont Charvet in France carried him to safety and probably saved his life.

It’s worth pointing out that the avalanche was undoubtedly triggered by Cavalade’s snow-shredding antics—it wasn’t necessarily a ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ scenario. But, his terrifying aerial footage of the avalanche also reveals the tracks of countless other ski runs, so he probably he assumed the mountain wasn’t primed for disaster that day. (We have no idea if he tested the snow for avalanche conditions ahead of this run.) Still, the gamble paid off, whether he knew he was making it or not. I wonder what other dangerous sports could benefit from the addition of parachutes?

[YouTube via Likecool]





Digital Trends

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

April 30, 2018 at 08:36AM
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What Shapes Are Things in Outer Space?

4/30/2018

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What Shapes Are Things in Outer Space?

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It’s an orgy of geometry, here on Earth. You got all kinds of shapes: Squares, trapezoids, even the occasional rhombus. Apples, desk-chairs, and dandelions—just an abundance of shape-having stuff. Outer space, in contrast, is minimally decorated: asteroids, stars, planets, galaxies. Big-picture stuff. We know the Earth is round—or, at least, most of us do—but what about the other stuff? What shapes are twirling around up there, and why do they look like that?

For this week’s Giz Asks, we posed those questions to a number of physicists and astronomers, who detailed the handful of shapes that exist in space and explained how, exactly, those shapes took form. There are really two processes at play here: one, the massive rotations, collisions and collapses that, over millions of years, have given form to outer space; and, two, the brief history of our efforts to understand and label them.

Alyssa A. Goodman

Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy and Co-Director for Science at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University

There are basically three important shapes that objects take in space. One is round, like a ball. One is a disc, like a frisbee—a very flat, round thing. And then the other one is generally a mess—not a regular shape, like a pyramid or a cube or something like that. A comet is good example of a mess.

The older something is, the more likely it is to have a distinct shape. In other words, a sphere or a disc takes a long time to format. One of the reasons that comets are so irregular is that they’re relatively new. Some part of them might be very old, but they get hit a lot as they form—they form out of sticking things together, little tiny dust particles, which themselves are irregular.

Fred Whipple has this great expression where he calls comets “dirty snowballs.” If you imagine a kid making a really bad snowball, that’s the shape of a comet—dirt and rocks and little pieces of asphalt. You don’t usually wind up making an absolutely perfect sphere unless you work on it for a while.

Planets are things that have forms due to something that came from a disc—when a star forms, the material that doesn’t go into the star forms into a frisbee-like disc, or more accurately a pancake-like disc.

The reason that you see those kinds of discs so often—the disc that’s going to form planets around a star, and also disc-like galaxies—has to do with angular momentum. When you have something spinning, there are forces on it that make it want to pull out to the sides and expand. The analogy that is usually used is the figure skater. The figure skater’s arms want to fly out to the side—that’s centrifugal force on her arms. Or think of an amusement park ride, where you stick to the sides of a very fast moving cylinder. That kind of centrifugal force makes things want to move outwards perpendicular to the axis around which something is spinning.

Even the Earth is not a perfect sphere. The Earth is a slightly smushed sphere: its diameter at its equator is slightly bigger than its diameter through the north and south pole. But what I’m talking about is something very, very extreme—if you spin really fast, and you don’t have any kind of structure stability from stuff like rock, which the Earth does, you make things into a pretty flat disc as they try to collapse. The same way we’re held to the Earth by gravity, any stuff can be held to any other stuff by gravity, so those things have a center of mass, and they want to move towards [that] mass.

So if you’re not spinning very much, then that would result in a sphere, because that force is [symmetric] to a point, which is the center of mass. But if you spin very fast, then there’s competition between the outward force from the spin—centrifugal force—the outward spin force and then the inward gravity and the spin one is just [plain] perpendicular to the rotation and the gravity is symmetric, so you wind up with disc. So that’s why a lot of galaxies look like discs, and a lot of material around forming stars look like discs.

Instability can make those discs into interesting patterns. Some of them turn into spiral galaxies, some of them fragment or break up in other ways.

Planets tend to be spherical, so why they’re not themselves discs is a very good question. In some cases we know the answer to that and in other cases we don’t. But they’re not spinning so fast that they would be crushed into discs. The Earth would have to be spinning really really fast in order for it to be more than just a tiny bit squished by its own rotations. There’s an outside crust that’s hard to smush. Gaseous planets like Jupiter or Saturn are spherical, but that’s because there’s a lot of pressure from the gas that makes them up. There’s a competition between various forces. Basically, if spin wins, you wind up with a disc. And if other things win, you wind up with a sphere. And if you haven’t had a lot of time, you wind up with something that wants to be a sphere but it’s a mess.

There’s a kind of galaxy called an elliptical galaxy, which are not spheres, but they’re not discs or messes, either. They’re kind of like an egg. And that happens from mergers from other galaxies coming together and adding up to almost a mess but not quite. They kind of try to become a sphere. You could almost say that an elliptical galaxy, if you left it alone for the longest possible time, might become something like a sphere, but many of them are already practically the age of the universe, so we don’t have enough time to know what would happen to them.

Pioneer 11, launched 45 years ago on April 5, 1973, became the first human-made object to fly past Saturn.
Image: NASA/Ames Research Center/Rick Guidice

Meredith Hughes

Assistant Professor, Astronomy, Wesleyan University

Planetary systems like ours are flat, with planets orbiting around in concentric orbits all going the same direction rather than buzzing around like bees in a hive.

Star and planet formation happens when dense pieces of molecular clouds collapse under the influence of gravity—essentially, when they become dense enough that gravity can overcome the cloud’s natural pressure. Molecular clouds are wreathing, smoky mixtures of gas and dust spread throughout our galaxy, and the collapse isolates one part of the cloud and shrinks it down to a relatively tiny size. That process of taking something that is slowly wreathing on large scales and shrinking it is exactly like what happens when a figure skater starts a slow spin and then pulls in her arms: the closer her arms get to her body, the faster she spins. The smaller the cloud gets, the faster it spins.

At that point, you have gravity being sticky and pulling things together, and you have angular momentum causing a major spin. Another situation in which you have a sticky substance that starts to spin is something you have probably done in your own kitchen: making a pizza. In a collapsing cloud, just like when you spin sticky pizza dough, the combination of spin and stickiness flattens the material into a disk- or pizza-like shape. We call these disks of leftover cloud material orbiting around young stars “protoplanetary disks,” because that leftover material from the cloud forms the building blocks for planets that will eventually orbit the star. Since the material starts off in a disk, which has a preferred plane and spin direction, the planets that form out of the disk generally retain that flat shape and the same spin direction—both in terms of which way they orbit around the star, and in terms of how they orbit on their axis. That’s why, when you look at orbits in the Solar System, all of the planets are located in a fairly flat plane, they all orbit the Sun in the same direction, and almost all of them rotate on their axes in the same direction (Venus and Uranus are the two exceptions—we think they got smacked by some other large body shortly after they formed that knocked them a bit off-kilter). This is an old idea, dating back to Kant and Laplace, but it’s one of the fundamental insights that forms the basis of our modern-day understanding of the planet formation process.

This 400 by 900 light-year mosaic of several Chandra images of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy reveals hundreds of white dwarf stars, neutron stars, and black holes bathed in an incandescent fog of multimillion-degree gas.
Image: NASA/UMass/D. Wang et al.

Richard Townsend

Associate Professor, Astronomy, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Most things in space—in particular, stars, planets, black holes and large asteroids —are spherical in shape, like a basketball. This is because the dominant force at the immense scales in space is gravity. For any sufficiently massive object, self-gravity—the gravitational pull of each part of the object on the other parts of the same object—tends to mold the object into the most compact form, and that happens to be a sphere. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule, however. If the mass of the object is not big enough to generate significant self-gravity, then other forces—for instance, structural forces arising from the rigid nature of solid matter—can counteract the gravity and produce a more complex shape. This is the reason why smaller asteroids, and also comets, are often not spherical; an example here is comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was revealed by the Rosetta probe to have a peculiar rubber-duck shape. It’s also the reason why humans are not spherical!

Another exception arises if the object is rapidly spinning. Then, inertial effects from the rotation (what we think of as the ‘centrifugal force’ in everyday life) counteract the gravitational force in directions perpendicular to the rotation axis. This often results in an ‘oblate spheroid’ shape similar to M&M candy, or a disk-like shape. We can see the former in our own solar system: Jupiter and Saturn both spin rapidly with a rotation period close to 10 hours, and both are oblate spheroids rather than spheres. Likewise, the latter can be seen in the structure of many galaxies, including our own Milky Way (the appearance of the Milky Way, as a band of diffuse light on the night sky, is because we’re embedded inside the disk).

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko via the Rosetta probe, and its weird shape.
Image: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM

Jonathan Levine

Associate Professor, Physics, Colgate University

Many objects in space, like stars and planets, are quite nearly spheres. The sphere is the shape with the greatest symmetry; it’s no different in one direction than any other. Stars take this shape because the gravity pulling themselves together finds an equilibrium with the pressure of their hot gas pushing themselves outward. Both gravity and pressure are isotropic, meaning that they too are symmetric, and have no reason to prefer one direction over another. The sphere’s symmetry is demanded by the symmetry of the two balanced symmetric forces.

Earth is almost a sphere as well, but in Earth’s case the gravity that would tend to compact it is opposed by the strength of rock and water, rather than the pressure of hot gas as in the Sun. Still, the material strength of Earth’s constituents are nearly isotropic as well, so our planet is quite nearly spherical.

I say “almost” and “quite nearly” because many objects in space, from planets to galaxies, are partly flattened because of their rotation. Earth spins on its axis every day, so in addition to gravity and material strength, there is also a tendency for material to be flung outward, away from the spin axis, and to accumulate in the body’s equator plane. For this reason, Earth is about a dozen miles wider at the hips than it is tall. For Saturn, with its lower density and faster spin, the difference between its width and height is more like 15%. The Milky Way, for its part, is nearly 100 times wider than it is tall. In all cases, the spin breaks the symmetry between one direction (the axis of rotation) and all others.

Pedants might quibble about my saying that material tends to be flung outward while spinning, since this statement smacks of centrifugal forces, which their physics teachers assured them did not exist. However, these people can thank me (and centrifugal force) next time they eat pizza, rather than a saucy cheesy dough-ball.

In this view captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on its closest-ever flyby of Saturn’s moon Mimas, large Herschel Crater dominates Mimas, making the moon look like the Death Star in the movie “Star Wars.”
Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute

Leslie Rogers

Assistant Professor, Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago

If an asteroid, moon, or planet is sufficiently massive, the force of its own gravity will be large enough to overcome the strength of the material from which the body is made, and the asteroid/moon/planet will be pulled into a rounded, nearly-spherical shape. Bodies made of rocky material will be gravitationally rounded if they’re larger than about ~450km in radius, while bodies made of weaker icy material will be pulled into a rounded shape if they’re larger than about ~200km in radius. Mimas, the “Death Star lookalike” moon of Saturn, is the smallest known gravitationally rounded body in the Solar System, having a radius of 198 km.

In fact, one of the requirements for a body in the Solar System to be defined a planet (according to the 2006 International Astronomical Union definition) is that it has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape).

Gravity would cause an isolated, non-rotating massive body to take on the shape of sphere. If the asteroid/moon/planet is rotating, it will take on the shape of an oblate ellipsoid that is flattened along the poles and bulges out at the equator. Due to rotational flattening, the radius of the Earth at the Equator is 21km larger than the radius of the Earth at the poles. Saturn is the most oblate planet in the Solar System, with its equatorial and polar radii differing by nearly 10%.

The presence of another mass (e.g., a star or a satellite) can also distort the shape of a planetary body due to tides. Because the force of gravity is stronger the closer one gets to a gravitating mass, the side of a planet that is closest to the other mass will feel a stronger gravitational pull than the most distant side. This has the effect of stretching the planet along the direction toward the other mass (star or satellite). It is tidal bulges on the Earth induced by the gravitational pull of the Moon that lead to the twice daily rise and fall of the ocean tides (which are especially prominent in the Bay of Fundy, near my hometown in Nova Scotia).

Pauline Bamby

Associate Professor, Physics and Astronomy, Western University

The shapes of things in space are due to competition between gravity, which wants to bring matter together; pressure, which wants to push matter apart, and rotation, which causes special directions within an object to be important.

Planets and stars are close to being spheres. All the matter within them exerts a gravitational pull on all the other matter, and the most efficient way to get the stuff as close together as possible is to arrange it in a sphere. Why doesn’t the gravity pull so hard that stars and planets collapse into smaller and smaller spheres and become a black hole? Because when the atoms within get close enough together, they push back against each other. That push back is another one reason planets aren’t quite spherical – the Earth isn’t perfectly smooth because the crust sticks together or folds up to make continents. The other reason planets and stars aren’t quite spherical is that they rotate: this squashes them a little so that they are fatter around the equator. For the Earth this results in a tiny difference between its radius at the poles and at the equator of about 0.2%; for other planets and some stars this difference can be much larger – about 10% for Saturn.

One of the ways we define an object as a planet is that its gravity pulls it into a sphere. The largest asteroids, like Vesta and Ceres, are also nearly-spherical. But smaller, “minor planets,” can be quite oddly-shaped, like anything from potatoes to footballs to dog bones. These shapes can depend on what the asteroid is made of and whether it has collided with other asteroids.

Galaxies are a slightly different story from stars and planets. Galaxies are so big that, unlike the atoms in a star, the stars inside a galaxy don’t generally get very close to one another. Gravity and the orbits of stars determine galaxies’ shapes, but getting to a final shape takes a very long time because the distances are so large. Left to their own devices, galaxies can be nearly-spherical, like planets and stars, or highly-flattened due to rotation—our Milky Way is one of these flattened spiral galaxies. Because they are so big, galaxies are more likely than stars or planets to collide! When galaxies get close to each other, their mutual gravity can pull out long tails or shells of stars and gas from their outskirts. If the galaxies are moving slowly enough to eventually merge, their shapes become quite lumpy and distorted—we affectionately call these “train wrecks”—until millions of years pass and gravity smooths everything out.

An illustration of ‘Oumuamua, the first object we’ve ever seen pass through our own solar system that has interstellar origins.
Image: European Southern Observatory/M. Kornmesser

Rachel Bezanson

Observational Astronomer, University of Pittsburgh

Galaxies in the nearby Universe come in two basic types: flattened disk-like spirals, like our Milky Way, and rounder, more spherical, elliptical galaxies. Spiral galaxies will often have a nearly spherical bulge in the center such that their overall shapes would closely resemble two sunny-side up eggs pasted together on their flat edges. If you rank-order galaxies by the ratio of bulge to disk size, eventually you start to find galaxies with no obvious disk at all—which we call elliptical galaxies. These galaxies are rarely perfectly spherical, but are often “oblate spheroids,” or hamburger-shaped, with one axis slightly shorter than the others.

Of course, when we see galaxies in the sky, we see them projected onto 2-dimensions, so depending on the angle from which we are looking, we can see spiral galaxies as anything from very narrow lines, possibly with a round bulge, if we see them edge-on to perfectly circular if they are face-on. Elliptical galaxies will also exhibit a range of projected elongations (from fairly narrow ellipses to circles), but will be rounder on average than spiral galaxies.

In general, the shapes of galaxies reflect the orbits of the stars racing around inside of them. If you have many stars orbiting in an ordered fashion in the same plane, their paths will trace out a thin disk, like the disks found in spiral galaxies. Any time you have significant populations of stars that trace out orbits in a different plane those random motions will start to create rounder, more spherical shapes in three dimensions. These random or non-planar orbits are found in the round bulges of spiral galaxies and in elliptical galaxies. We think that most stars in the Universe form in disk-like structures, therefore all random orbits—and therefore rounder shapes—that we observe are caused by galaxy interactions and collisions. Therefore determining the shape of galaxies and the nature of their stellar orbits are instrumental to understanding their cosmic history.

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April 30, 2018 at 08:30AM
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Europe eyeing bot IDs ad transparency and blockchain to fight fakes

4/30/2018

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Europe eyeing bot IDs, ad transparency and blockchain to fight fakes

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European Union lawmakers want online platforms to come up with their own systems to identify bot accounts.

This is as part of a voluntary Code of Practice the European Commission now wants platforms to develop and apply — by this summer — as part of a wider package of proposals it’s put out which are generally aimed at tackling the problematic spread and impact of disinformation online.

The proposals follow an EC-commissioned report last month, by its High-Level Expert Group, which recommended more transparency from online platforms to help combat the spread of false information online — and also called for urgent investment in media and information literacy education, and strategies to empower journalists and foster a diverse and sustainable news media ecosystem.

Bots, fake accounts, political ads, filter bubbles

In an announcement on Friday the Commission said it wants platforms to establish “clear marking systems and rules for bots” in order to ensure “their activities cannot be confused with human interactions”. It does not go into a greater level of detail on how that might be achieved. Clearly it’s intending platforms to have to come up with relevant methodologies.

Identifying bots is not an exact science — as academics conducting research into how information spreads online could tell you. The current tools that exist for trying to spot bots typically involve rating accounts across a range of criteria to give a score of how likely an account is to be algorithmically controlled vs human controlled. But platforms do at least have a perfect view into their own systems, whereas academics have had to rely on the variable level of access platforms are willing to give them.

Another factor here is that given the sophisticated nature of some online disinformation campaigns — the state-sponsored and heavily resourced efforts by Kremlin backed entities such as Russia’s Internet Research Agency, for example — if the focus ends up being algorithmically controlled bots vs IDing bots that might have human agents helping or controlling them, plenty of more insidious disinformation agents could easily slip through the cracks.

That said, other measures in the EC’s proposals for platforms include stepping up their existing efforts to shutter fake accounts and being able to demonstrate the “effectiveness” of such efforts — so greater transparency around how fake accounts are identified and the proportion being removed (which could help surface more sophisticated human-controlled bot activity on platforms too).

Another measure from the package: The EC says it wants to see “significantly” improved scrutiny of ad placements — with a focus on trying to reduce revenue opportunities for disinformation purveyors.

Restricting targeting options for political advertising is another component. “Ensure transparency about sponsored content relating to electoral and policy-making processes,” is one of the listed objectives on its fact sheet — and ad transparency is something Facebook has said it’s prioritizing since revelations about the extent of Kremlin disinformation on its platform during the 2016 US presidential election, with expanded tools due this summer.

The Commission also says generally that it wants platforms to provide “greater clarity about the functioning of algorithms” and enable third-party verification — though there’s no greater level of detail being provided at this point to indicate how much algorithmic accountability it’s after from platforms.

We’ve asked for more on its thinking here and will update this story with any response. It looks to be seeking to test the water to see how much of the workings of platforms’ algorithmic blackboxes can be coaxed from them voluntarily — such as via measures targeting bots and fake accounts — in an attempt to stave off formal and more fulsome regulations down the line.

Filter bubbles also appear to be informing the Commission’s thinking, as it says it wants platforms to make it easier for users to “discover and access different news sources representing alternative viewpoints” — via tools that let users customize and interact with the online experience to “facilitate content discovery and access to different news sources”.

Though another stated objective is for platforms to “improve access to trustworthy information” — so there are questions about how those two aims can be balanced, i.e. without efforts towards one undermining the other. 

On trustworthiness, the EC says it wants platforms to help users assess whether content is reliable using “indicators of the trustworthiness of content sources”, as well as by providing “easily accessible tools to report disinformation”.

In one of several steps Facebook has taken since 2016 to try to tackle the problem of fake content being spread on its platform the company experimented with putting ‘disputed’ labels or red flags on potentially untrustworthy information. However the company discontinued this in December after research suggested negative labels could entrench deeply held beliefs, rather than helping to debunk fake stories.

Instead it started showing related stories — containing content it had verified as coming from news outlets its network of fact checkers considered reputable — as an alternative way to debunk potential fakes.

The Commission’s approach looks to be aligning with Facebook’s rethought approach — with the subjective question of how to make judgements on what is (and therefore what isn’t) a trustworthy source likely being handed off to third parties, given that another strand of the code is focused on “enabling fact-checkers, researchers and public authorities to continuously monitor online disinformation”.

Since 2016 Facebook has been leaning heavily on a network of local third party ‘partner’ fact-checkers to help identify and mitigate the spread of fakes in different markets — including checkers for written content and also photos and videos, the latter in an effort to combat fake memes before they have a chance to go viral and skew perceptions.

In parallel Google has also been working with external fact checkers, such as on initiatives such as highlighting fact-checked articles in Google News and search. 

The Commission clearly approves of the companies reaching out to a wider network of third party experts. But it is also encouraging work on innovative tech-powered fixes to the complex problem of disinformation — describing AI (“subject to appropriate human oversight”) as set to play a “crucial” role for “verifying, identifying and tagging disinformation”, and pointing to blockchain as having promise for content validation.

Specifically it reckons blockchain technology could play a role by, for instance, being combined with the use of “trustworthy electronic identification, authentication and verified pseudonyms” to preserve the integrity of content and validate “information and/or its sources, enable transparency and traceability, and promote trust in news displayed on the Internet”.

It’s one of a handful of nascent technologies the executive flags as potentially useful for fighting fake news, and whose development it says it intends to support via an existing EU research funding vehicle: The Horizon 2020 Work Program.

It says it will use this program to support research activities on “tools and technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain that can contribute to a better online space, increasing cybersecurity and trust in online services”.

It also flags “cognitive algorithms that handle contextually-relevant information, including the accuracy and the quality of data sources” as a promising tech to “improve the relevance and reliability of search results”.

The Commission is giving platforms until July to develop and apply the Code of Practice — and is using the possibility that it could still draw up new laws if it feels the voluntary measures fail as a mechanism to encourage companies to put the sweat in.

It is also proposing a range of other measures to tackle the online disinformation issue — including:

  • An independent European network of fact-checkers: The Commission says this will establish “common working methods, exchange best practices, and work to achieve the broadest possible coverage of factual corrections across the EU”; and says they will be selected from the EU members of the International Fact Checking Network which it notes follows “a strict International Fact Checking NetworkCode of Principles”
  • A secure European online platform on disinformation to support the network of fact-checkers and relevant academic researchers with “cross-border data collection and analysis”, as well as benefitting from access to EU-wide data
  • Enhancing media literacy: On this it says a higher level of media literacy will “help Europeans to identify online disinformation and approach online content with a critical eye”. So it says it will encourage fact-checkers and civil society organisations to provide educational material to schools and educators, and organise a European Week of Media Literacy
  • Support for Member States in ensuring the resilience of elections against what it dubs “increasingly complex cyber threats” including online disinformation and cyber attacks. Stated measures here include encouraging national authorities to identify best practices for the identification, mitigation and management of risks in time for the 2019 European Parliament elections. It also notes work by a Cooperation Group, saying “Member States have started to map existing European initiatives on cybersecurity of network and information systems used for electoral processes, with the aim of developing voluntary guidance” by the end of the year.  It also says it will also organise a high-level conference with Member States on cyber-enabled threats to elections in late 2018
  • Promotion of voluntary online identification systems with the stated aim of improving the “traceability and identification of suppliers of information” and promoting “more trust and reliability in online interactions and in information and its sources”. This includes support for related research activities in technologies such as blockchain, as noted above. The Commission also says it will “explore the feasibility of setting up voluntary systems to allow greater accountability based on electronic identification and authentication scheme” — as a measure to tackle fake accounts. “Together with others actions aimed at improving traceability online (improving the functioning, availability and accuracy of information on IP and domain names in the WHOIS system and promoting the uptake of the IPv6 protocol), this would also contribute to limiting cyberattacks,” it adds
  • Support for quality and diversified information: The Commission is calling on Member States to scale up their support of quality journalism to ensure a pluralistic, diverse and sustainable media environment. The Commission says it will launch a call for proposals in 2018 for “the production and dissemination of quality news content on EU affairs through data-driven news media”

It says it will aim to co-ordinate its strategic comms policy to try to counter “false narratives about Europe” — which makes you wonder whether debunking the output of certain UK tabloid newspapers might fall under that new EC strategy — and also more broadly to tackle disinformation “within and outside the EU”.

Commenting on the proposals in a statement, the Commission’s VP for the Digital Single Market, Andrus Ansip, said: “Disinformation is not new as an instrument of political influence. New technologies, especially digital, have expanded its reach via the online environment to undermine our democracy and society. Since online trust is easy to break but difficult to rebuild, industry needs to work together with us on this issue. Online platforms have an important role to play in fighting disinformation campaigns organised by individuals and countries who aim to threaten our democracy.”

The EC’s next steps now will be bringing the relevant parties together — including platforms, the ad industry and “major advertisers” — in a forum to work on greasing cooperation and getting them to apply themselves to what are still, at this stage, voluntary measures.

“The forum’s first output should be an EU–wide Code of Practice on Disinformation to be published by July 2018, with a view to having a measurable impact by October 2018,” says the Commission. 

The first progress report will be published in December 2018. “The report will also examine the need for further action to ensure the continuous monitoring and evaluation of the outlined actions,” it warns.

And if self-regulations fail…

In a fact sheet further fleshing out its plans, the Commission states: “Should the self-regulatory approach fail, the Commission may propose further actions, including regulatory ones targeted at a few platforms.”

And for “a few” read: Mainstream social platforms — so likely the big tech players in the social digital arena: Facebook, Google, Twitter.

For potential regulatory actions tech giants only need look to Germany, where a 2017 social media hate speech law has introduced fines of up to €50M for platforms that fail to comply with valid takedown requests within 24 hours for simple cases, for an example of the kind of scary EU-wide law that could come rushing down the pipe at them if the Commission and EU states decide its necessary to legislate.

Though justice and consumer affairs commissioner, Vera Jourova, signaled in January that her preference on hate speech at least was to continue pursuing the voluntary approach — though she also said some Member State’s ministers are open to a new EU-level law should the voluntary approach fail.

In Germany the so-called NetzDG law has faced criticism for pushing platforms towards risk aversion-based censorship of online content. And the Commission is clearly keen to avoid such charges being leveled at its proposals, stressing that if regulation were to be deemed necessary “such [regulatory] actions should in any case strictly respect freedom of expression”.

Commenting on the Code of Practice proposals, a Facebook spokesperson told us: “People want accurate information on Facebook – and that’s what we want too. We have invested in heavily in fighting false news on Facebook by disrupting the economic incentives for the spread of false news, building new products and working with third-party fact checkers.”

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on the Commission’s proposals but flagged contributions he said the company is already making to support media literacy — including an event last week at its EMEA HQ.

At the time of writing Google had not responded to a request for comment.

Last month the Commission did further tighten the screw on platforms over terrorist content specifically —  saying it wants them to get this taken down within an hour of a report as a general rule. Though it still hasn’t taken the step to cement that hour ‘rule’ into legislation, also preferring to see how much action it can voluntarily squeeze out of platforms via a self-regulation route.

 





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April 30, 2018 at 08:24AM
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Fitbit will use Google Cloud to make its data available to doctors

4/30/2018

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Fitbit will use Google Cloud to make its data available to doctors

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Fitbit this morning announced plans to utilize Google’s new Cloud Healthcare API, in order to continue its push into the world of serious healthcare devices. It’s a bit of a no-brainer as far as partnerships go.

Google announced Cloud for Healthcare, taking a major step into the world of health, which comprised around $3.3 trillion in U.S. spending in 2016 alone. Unchecked, that number is expected to balloon even further over the next several years.

For its part, the company is leveraging existing cloud offerings to create an information sharing infrastructure for the massive world of healthcare. In its earliest stages, Google partnered with medical facilities like the Stanford School of Medicine, so a deal with Fitbit should prove a solid step toward mainstreaming its offering.

For Fitbit, the deal means moving a step closer toward healthcare legitimacy. At a recent event, CEO James Park told us that health was set to comprise a big part of the consumer electronics company’s plans moving forward. It’s clear he wasn’t quite as all-in with Jawbone, which shuttered the consumer side entirely, but there’s definitely money to be made for a company that can make legitimate health tracking ubiquitous.

The plan is to offer a centralized stop for doctors to monitor both electronic medical records and regular monitoring from Fitbit’s devices. Recently acquired Twine Health, meanwhile, will help the company give more insight into issues like diabetes and hypertension.

No word yet on a timeline for when all of this will become widely available.





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April 30, 2018 at 08:17AM
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An Anti-Aging Pundit Solves a Decades-Old Math Problem

4/30/2018

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An Anti-Aging Pundit Solves a Decades-Old Math Problem

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In 1950 Edward Nelson, then a student at the University of Chicago, asked the kind of deceptively simple question that can give mathematicians fits for decades. Imagine, he said, a graph—a collection of points connected by lines. Ensure that all of the lines are exactly the same length, and that everything lies on the plane. Now color all the points, ensuring that no two connected points have the same color. Nelson asked: What is the smallest number of colors that you’d need to color any such graph, even one formed by linking an infinite number of vertices?

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Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

The problem, now known as the Hadwiger-Nelson problem or the problem of finding the chromatic number of the plane, has piqued the interest of many mathematicians, including the famously prolific Paul Erdős. Researchers quickly narrowed the possibilities down, finding that the infinite graph can be colored by no fewer than four and no more than seven colors. Other researchers went on to prove a few partial results in the decades that followed, but no one was able to change these bounds.

Then last week, Aubrey de Grey, a biologist known for his claims that people alive today will live to the age of 1,000, posted a paper to the scientific preprint site arxiv.org with the title “The Chromatic Number of the Plane Is at Least 5.” In it, he describes the construction of a unit-distance graph that can’t be colored with only four colors. The finding represents the first major advance in solving the problem since shortly after it was introduced. “I got extraordinarily lucky,” de Grey said. “It’s not every day that somebody comes up with the solution to a 60-year-old problem.”

Aubrey de Grey came up with the first unit-distance graph that requires at least five colors.

Aubrey de Grey/SENS Research Foundation

De Grey appears to be an unlikely mathematical trailblazer. He is the co-founder and chief science officer of an organization that aims to develop technologies for “reversing the negative effects of aging.” He found his way to the chromatic number of the plane problem through a board game. Decades ago, de Grey was a competitive Othello player, and he fell in with some mathematicians who were also enthusiasts of the game. They introduced him to graph theory, and he comes back to it now and then. “Occasionally, when I need a rest from my real job, I’ll think about math,” he said. Over Christmas last year, he had a chance to do that.

It is unusual, but not unheard of, for an amateur mathematician to make significant progress on a long-standing open problem. In the 1970s, Marjorie Rice, a homemaker with no mathematical background, ran across a Scientific American column about pentagons that tile the plane. She eventually added four new pentagons to the list. Gil Kalai, a mathematician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said it is gratifying to see a nonprofessional mathematician make a major breakthrough. “It really adds to the many facets of the mathematical experience,” he said.

Perhaps the most famous graph coloring question is the four-color theorem. It states that, assuming every country is one continuous lump, any map can be colored using only four colors so that no two adjacent countries have the same color. The exact sizes and shapes of the countries don’t matter, so mathematicians can translate the problem into the world of graph theory by representing every country as a vertex and connecting two vertices with an edge if the corresponding countries share a border.

Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine

The Hadwiger-Nelson problem is a bit different. Instead of considering a finite number of vertices, as there would be on a map, it considers infinitely many vertices, one for each point in the plane. Two points are connected by an edge if they are exactly one unit apart. To find a lower bound for the chromatic number, it suffices to create a graph with a finite number of vertices that requires a particular number of colors. That’s what de Grey did.

De Grey based his graph on a gadget called the Moser spindle, named after mathematical brothers Leo and William Moser. It is a configuration of just seven points and 11 edges that has a chromatic number of four. Through a delicate process, and with minimal computer assistance, de Grey fused copies of the Moser spindle and another small assembly of points into a 20,425-vertex monstrosity that could not be colored using four colors. He was later able to shrink the graph to 1,581 vertices and do a computer check to verify that it was not four-colorable.

De Grey’s 1,581-vertex graph. (Click

here

for a high-resolution version.)

Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine; Source: Aubrey de Grey

The discovery of any graph that requires five colors was a major accomplishment, but mathematicians wanted to see if they could find a smaller graph that would do the same. Perhaps finding a smaller five-color graph — or the smallest possible five-color graph — would give researchers further insight into the Hadwiger-Nelson problem, allowing them to prove that exactly five shades (or six, or seven) are enough to color a graph made from all the points of the plane.

De Grey pitched the problem of finding the minimal five-color graph to Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, as a potential Polymath problem. Polymath began about 10 years ago when Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, wanted to find a way to facilitate massive online collaborations in mathematics. Work on Polymath problems is done publicly, and anyone can contribute. Recently, de Grey was involved with a Polymath collaboration that led to significant progress on the twin prime problem.

Tao says not every math problem is a good fit for Polymath, but de Grey’s has a few things going for it. The problem is easy to understand and start working on, and there is a clear measure of success: lowering the number of vertices in a non-four-colorable graph. Soon enough, Dustin Mixon, a mathematician at Ohio State University, and his collaborator Boris Alexeev found a graph with 1,577 vertices. On Saturday, Marijn Heule, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, found one with just 874 vertices. Yesterday he lowered this number to 826 vertices.

Such work has sparked hope that the six-decade-old Hadwiger-Nelson problem is worth another look. “For a problem like this, the final solution might be some incredibly deep mathematics,” said Gordon Royle, a mathematician at the University of Western Australia. “Or it could just be somebody’s ingenuity finding a graph that requires many colors.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.





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April 30, 2018 at 08:15AM
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How a Soviet A-Bomb Test Launched US Climate Science

4/30/2018

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How a Soviet A-Bomb Test Launched US Climate Science

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This story originally appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On March 23, 1971, the Soviet Union set off three Hiroshima-scale nuclear blasts deep underground in a remote region some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, ripping a massive crater in the earth. The goal was to demonstrate that nuclear explosions could be used to dig a canal connecting two rivers, altering their direction and bringing water to dry areas for agriculture.

The nuclear bombs, it turned out, weren’t that effective for building canals, though they did create an “atomic lake” in the crater formed by the blast. But the tests had another lasting consequence, all but forgotten until now: They set in motion the first US government research on climate change—a far-reaching project that has continued into this decade.

On the surface, the reaction to the Soviet tests was somewhat muted. Western countries, including the United States, detected the explosions and lodged a protest alleging a violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Moscow wouldn’t publicly acknowledge the tests for several years.

But in the national security community in Washington, the blasts sparked panic. When intelligence officials briefed Stephen Lukasik, the director of the Pentagon’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he had an immediate reaction: “Holy shit. This is dangerous.”

The Soviet Union, it turns out, had for more than a decade been studying ways to use nuclear weapons to create massive canals to reroute water for irrigation, and the plan involved hundreds of nuclear detonations. “The Soviets wanted to change the direction of some rivers in Russia,” Lukasik, now 87 years old, told me recently in an interview. “They flow north where they didn’t do any good for them and they wanted to turn them around so they would flow south.”

The Pentagon didn’t particularly care which way rivers ran in the Soviet Union, but it cared about how this ambitious act of geoengineering, which would affect waters flowing into the Arctic Ocean, could potentially alter the world’s climate. Lukasik decided that Darpa needed to start a climate research program that could come up with ways to model the effects. The name of this climate program, highly classified at the time, was Nile Blue.

At first glance, Darpa might have seemed like an odd place to study climate change. The agency was created in 1958 as a response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, to help the United States get into space. But in those years, Darpa was also deeply involved in nuclear issues. It had created an extensive monitoring system precisely to tip off the Pentagon to secret tests like the Soviet effort in 1971.

That same year, John Perry, a young Air Force officer, got an unexpected question from an official at Darpa (at the time called just ARPA; the D for “defense” was added in 1972.) “We need a program manager for this program we have. Would you like to come to Washington?” the Darpa official asked Perry.

“Washington was the not the Midwest or Vietnam, so I said, ‘Sure.’” Perry recalled answering. “I’ll discover later what the hell this thing is.”

For Perry, a meteorologist by training, it wasn’t a hard decision, even if he didn’t know exactly what the job entailed. He soon found himself at Darpa's headquarters in northern Virginia, where he was put in charge of the mysteriously named Nile Blue. One of the first things he decided to do was get rid of the secrecy. Even if the concerns about Soviet nuclear tests needed to be kept quiet, research on climate modeling could be done in the open. Keeping the program classified, particularly during the Vietnam War, would only hurt Darpa's ability to work with academic scientists, he argued.

The secrecy “did throw sort of a miasma over the program,” Perry recalled, noting there were rumors that Darpa was involved in weather-altering research. “In fact, I had a visit from a guy from the arms control office in the State Department who came over, armed with top-secret clearances and what-have-you, to find out what nefarious things we were doing. He was very disappointed to find out that there weren’t any.”

Once the program was declassified, the next step was finding scientists to do the necessary studies. Perry found himself in charge of $3 million in funding, a sizable sum in the early 1970s, and his mandate was about to expand.

Soon after starting the research program, he was summoned to the director’s office to meet with Lukasik and Eric Willis, who directed Darpa's nuclear monitoring program. Willis, who had been a student of Willard Libby, the inventor of radiocarbon dating, was interested in taking a historical look at climate.

Willis “took the position that the climate research program really didn’t make any sense unless you had good information on past climates to be able to do the verification models,” Perry recalled. “He thought there should be an element of past climate research in there.”

Perry knew nothing about this topic, so he nodded and smiled before walking out of the director’s office with a new charge to spend $400,000 on paleoclimate research. “Essentially, I called up a few people and said, ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I want to give you a lot of money,’” he said.

The heart of the Nile Blue program was computational modeling. Darpa may not have had experience with meteorology, but it did have plenty of experience with computers. Just two years earlier, the agency’s computer science office had established the first nodes of ARPANET, the network that would later become the internet. Darpa was also in charge of the Illiac IV, one of the world’s first supercomputers.

Darpa's climate work helped justify the continuation of Illiac IV, whose costs were attracting scrutiny. “They needed to say that its capability was being developed for some customers who could pay for it,” Perry said. “Climate modeling is a very good customer for computer science.” (Critically, Darpa's funding for modeling rescued the RAND Corporation’s work on climate simulation, which the National Science Foundation was on the verge of canceling.)

The modeling work had its critics. Perry recalled that Ruth Reck, an atmospheric scientist at General Motors, expressed early skepticism of Darpa-funded climate models. “Modeling is just like masturbation,” he recalled Reck telling some of the Darpa-funded scientists at a conference. “If you do it too much, you start thinking it’s the real thing.”

Reck, who confirmed the anecdote in a recent interview with me, said her point was that scientists were confusing their models with reality. “They had a right to feel glad that they were doing it, they were contributing a lot, but it didn’t mean it was the real thing. It just wasn’t,” she said. “That is very much like masturbation: If they do it enough, it becomes the focus of what they want.”

Yet Darpa's work was critical to sparking those debates. The research program for the first time was drawing together modelers, paleo-climatologists, radiation experts, and meteorologists. The program created an interdisciplinary field, according to Warren Wiscombe, who credits the agency for transforming him from an applied mathematician into a climate scientist in the 1970s. “All of the sciences then that later contributed to climate science were very separate and they had brick walls between them,” he said. “They were what we call stovepiped now.”

As Darpa was building up its Nile Blue program, another government effort that would alter the course of climate research was taking place behind the scenes. In December 1972, George J. Kukla, of Columbia University, and R.K. Matthews, of Brown, wrote to President Richard Nixon expressing their concerns about “a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experience by civilized mankind.”

Their concern was not global warming, but cooling, which they feared could lower food production and increase extreme weather. It was a preliminary result (and one that would later be used by critics of climate change in a simplistic fashion to argue that climate predictions were wrong). The letter caught the attention of Nixon, who ordered an interagency panel to look at the issue. The recommendation, according to William Sprigg, who helped set up the national climate program, was “that the government should have some kind of a program, a plan that would set goals and determine who should be doing what.”

A 1948 article in Mechanix Illustrated vividly captured American fears about the Soviet nuclear program.

Apic/Getty Images

In the end, the Soviets abandoned their grand plan to alter the course of rivers, but by the time Darpa finished its research in 1976, the foundation of climate research was firmly in place: a community of scientists dedicated to the issue, and a political atmosphere conducive to continuing the research. Darpa, whose mandate is for fixed-term research, ended its climate program, but the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked up the work, eventually leading to the establishment of the national climate program.

Even scientists like Reck, who were critical of some of the early modeling work, said the research has showed clearly that climate change is real. “I stand with what I told John [Perry] years ago: ‘I really don’t think we know, I think we are far from understanding the climate,’” she told me. “That does not mean we should not curtail everything that we can to slow down the rate of change. I think we have to do that. I think it’s absolutely frivolous not to do that.”

While the debates go on about the accuracy of climate models, the scientific consensus is that climate change is real, and much of the credit for establishing that consensus goes to Darpa—whose role has been largely forgotten, except by the scientists funded by the program and who went on to take leading positions in climate research.

More than 40 years after the end of Nile Blue, former Darpa officials like Perry and Lukasik still get together for a monthly lunch, where they reminisce about their days at the pioneering agency. Lukasik recalls Perry telling him: “You know, Steve, the work started in Darpa and continued by me in the National Science Foundation became the foundation for all of the understanding of global warming.”





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April 30, 2018 at 08:15AM
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