It is that simple…
Blog
How CDC Blatantly Uses Weekly Reports to Spread COVID Disinformation: Three Examples
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — the primary U.S. health protection agency — publicly pledges, among other things, to “base all public health decisions on the highest quality scientific data that is derived openly and objectively.”
The CDC’s “primary vehicle for scientific publication of timely, reliable, authoritative, accurate, objective, and useful public health information and recommendations,” according to the agency, is its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
The CDC states that the MMWR readership consists predominantly of physicians, nurses, public health practitioners, epidemiologists and other scientists, researchers, educators and laboratorians.
However, these weekly reports also serve as the means by which the agency disseminates its scientific findings to a much wider readership through media outlets that inform hundreds of millions of people.
Though the CDC asserts its MMWRs reliably communicate accurate and objective public health information, the reports are not subject to peer review, and the data behind the scientific findings are not always available to the public.
Professor Insists Anti-Cheating Rules Aren’t Fair to ‘Black and Latinx’ Students
University of Cincinnati instructor Antar A. Tichavakunda has strong views on regulations regarding particularly pigmented pupils.
The professor has penned a piece for Inside Higher Ed insisting darker individuals don’t deserve the same rules as whites.
In “Let’s Talk About Race and Academic Integrity,” he serves up stats:
[In a study], Black and Asian…students reported being accused of plagiarism [twice that of] any other group… Further, Black students were the most likely to report being accused of cheating in college (9 percent of Black students reported being accused of cheating in a college course, compared to 6 percent of all students).
Hence, we need to take a serious look at race related to “academic integrity.”
For those of you who are unfamiliar:
Academic integrity is already about race. From the assumptions behind who looks like they are cheating to the punishments given for cheating to the technology that monitors cheating to what counts as cheating, the idea of academic integrity is racialized through and through.
It appears Antar’s positions hold that only white people can be racist; and white people are indeed racist. He gives the example of a black woman to whom he spoke while doing book research. She explained she was the only black female in her major and she never cheated. Once, she caught someone trying to copy her during a test. She moved across the room, fearing she’d be the one accused.
According to Antar, that proved a point:
The measures she took…are telling. … Racist and sexist beliefs shape assumptions about who looks like they are cheating and who is likely to be believed in front of a non-Black instructor.
He assails anti-cheating software, which “does not always accurately assess people who have darker skin.”
[A]s scholars such as Ruha Benjamin and Safiya Noble have shown, the algorithms and codes structuring such technologies can perpetuate racial biases and stereotypes.
Amid our ideas on academic integrity, he poses, “we can be too punitive.”
He wouldn’t destructively ding a student solely for lifting lines:
I won’t be failing a student for one copy and paste too many when the option of a redirection and a resetting of expectations is right there. Often, the problem lies in pedagogy — not the student. A zero-tolerance policy around plagiarism or academic integrity can do more harm than good.
Intolerance = inequity = iniquity:
If zero-tolerance educational policies have taught us anything, it is that they tend to disproportionately harm Black and Latinx students. The same goes for academic integrity policies.
It sounds as if whitey makes the rules; and he’s boldly bigoted:
The people who make the decisions about which transgressions are forgivable and which transgressions are necessary to report and punish do not exist in a race-neutral vacuum.
Interrogation’s on order:
Decision makers, from faculty members to student conduct officers, hold beliefs about identity that — if uninterrogated — could potentially be racist and discriminatory.
The instructor also asserts — “from experience” — that white fraternities and sororities “sometimes have test banks that members can use.”
His takeaway:
Some students take exams and do homework with unfair advantages.
And:
Collaborating or cheating on exams can adversely impact Black students at schools where they are in the extreme minority.
It seems everyone cheats. But blacks have fewer chances; Re: racism.
The ‘Massive Conspiracy’ Hiding Biden’s Mental Decline
The media has begun to admit what has been obvious for years: President Joe Biden is in mental decline.
On July 9, Peter Baker, the New York Times’ White House correspondent, broke the mainstream media taboo against mentioning Biden’s increasingly shaky mental state with an article headlined: “At 79, Biden Is Testing the Boundaries of Age and the Presidency.”
“Some aides quietly watch out for him,” Baker wrote. “He often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire. He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.”
Those concessions have come at a time when Biden’s presidency is severely weakened and some Democrats have begun to turn on him, frustrated by, among other things, 9.1 percent inflation year-over-year, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and his failure to pass the transformative legislation he promised.
There remains significant media resistance to the idea that Biden’s mental abilities are even a legitimate topic of discussion. For instance, a May Bloomberg article called the assertion that Biden is cognitively impaired a “smear.”
Nevertheless, the past month has been filled with media admissions that perhaps the former vice president and senator from Delaware is not the man he once was.
Merriam-Webster Changes Definition of “Female” at the Behest of Transgender Activists
Merriam-Webster has bowed to transgender activists by literally changing the definition of the word “female” to include anyone who identifies as one.
Yes, really.
A new entry for the word female includes the description, “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”
Previous descriptions of the word have also been amended to please demented far-left clowns.
A female is now someone “of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs.”
They’re also “made up of usually adult members of the female sex.”
Definitions for the word “male” have also been similarly deformed.
Mystery solved: DOJ secretly thwarted release of Russia documents declassified by Trump
In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents.
The previously untold story of how highly anticipated declassified material never became public is contained in a memo obtained by Just the News from the National Archives that was written by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just hours before Trump left office on noon of Jan. 20, 2021.
Meadows’ memo confirmed prior reporting by Just the News that Trump on Jan. 19, 2021 declassified a binder of hundreds of pages of sensitive FBI documents that show how the bureau used informants and FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and misled both a federal court and Congress about flaws in the evidence they offered to get approval for the investigation.
The declassified documents included transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
Engineers Have Created ‘Small-Scale’ Soft Robots That Can Crawl Around a Stomach and Deliver Drug ‘Cargo’
In a new study published in Science Advances a team of engineers at The Chinese University of Hong Kong outlines how it has created small-scale soft robots capable of multimodal locomotion, drug cargo delivery, and the ability to tolerate exposure to acid. A prime use case for the small-scale robots—which are tens of millimeters across depending on their shape—is, according to the engineers, “for biomedical applications that involve operation in the stomach such as gastric ulcer treatment.” As a proof-of-concept for the study, the researchers even had one of the small, soft robots roll around in an ex vivo pig’s stomach and apply a “therapy patch.”
In their study the engineers describe how their small-scale robots utilize a “modular soft magnetic architecture” with individual parts of the robots containing magnetic microparticles that each have their own prescribed magnetization profiles—that is, they each respond to their own type of magnetic field depending on the directionality of the field.
These “modular magnetization units” are embedded into a “network of adhesive sticker layers” in order to form the soft robots, which are capable of taking on either 2D or 3D shapes. “Functional” modules consisting of different materials, and having different shapes—e.g., particles, papers, films, foams, and electronic components—can then be “seamlessly integrated” into the small-scale robots.
Over 1,600 of the Brightest Scientific Minds in Technology Have Signed a Letter Calling Both Crypto and Blockchain a Sham
The letter is a punch in the gut to the Wall Street underwriters who have brought billions of dollars of crypto related companies to the public markets, most of which have now collapsed in price. It makes the billionaire venture capitalists who have invested billions in crypto startups look like fools. And it renders the big-name celebrities who have promoted this garbage in TV commercials look like the shills that they are.
The letter was sent to key members of Congress and to the Chairs of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees. It is signed by more than 1,600 computer scientists, software engineers and technologists from around the world. There are 45 signatories who currently work at Google; 19 who work at Microsoft; 11 employed at Apple. (Those three companies currently have a collective market capitalization of more than $5.75 trillion; they can afford to hire the best and the brightest.) There are signatories that are Ph.Ds from the most prestigious universities in the world, including the University of Oxford and MIT. And all 1,600 have signed a letter that says this about crypto and blockchain:
“We strongly disagree with the narrative—peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry—that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation and are in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans…
“As software engineers and technologists with deep expertise in our fields, we dispute the claims made in recent years about the novelty and potential of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal or data privacy mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.”
The letter links to an article from Bruce Schneier, a Security Technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School. The article appeared at Wired on February 6, 2019 under the headline: “There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology.” The article makes the following salient points:
“What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.
“When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?”
Losing your money is mostly what has been going on this year in crypto. In addition to crypto itself being a dubious “investment,” the Federal Trade Commission reported in June that “since the start of 2021, more than 46,000 people have reported losing over $1 billion in crypto to scams. That’s about one out of every four dollars reportedly lost to fraud during that period.” (For more on the perils of crypto investing, see our report on how customers on the Coinbase crypto exchange are being victimized.)
Stimulated!
Solar Panels Subsidized By Gov’t Are Winding Up In Landfills, Contaminating Groundwater With Toxic Metals
Oh, the irony…California’s massive push for adaptation of solar over the last several decades in order to ascertain more “clean” energy is now becoming a problem for landfills.
After 1.3 million solar installs later, the first push of panels are reaching the end of their “typical 25-to-30-year life cycle”, according to Yahoo.
And now for the coda to the “clean energy” story: many of the panels are “winding up in landfills, where in some cases, they could potentially contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium” the report says.
One expert told yahoo that only 1 in 10 panels are actually recycled – the rest are contributing to “truckloads of waste”, some of which is contaminated, according to the report.
Sam Vanderhoof, a solar industry expert and chief executive of Recycle PV Solar told Yahoo: “The industry is supposed to be green. But in reality, it’s all about the money.”
California has been pushing for solar since 2006, when the state approved $3.3 billion in subsidies. Now, about 15% of the state’s power comes from solar – but that belies the environmental disaster disposing of the panels has become.
You must be logged in to post a comment.