Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
The Biden transition team has already stacked its agency review teams
with more tech executives than tech critics. It has also added to its
staff several officials from Big Tech companies, which emerged as
top donors to the campaign.
...
For example, Google's former Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, a billionaire
who is a Silicon Valley titan, has been making personnel recommendations
for appointments to the Department of Defense - as the company tries to
pursue military contracts and defense work, according to three sources.
While many reports have proposed antitrust remedies to some of these
harms, the Stanford report advocates for a "middleware" solution,
in which platforms open their APIs to third-party companies that
would offer users ways to choose how information on the platforms is
filtered for them. It also advocates for the creation of a digital
agency with the power to oversee these markets.
...
These platforms control a great deal of the political speech
that happens in the United States. They can amplify certain messages;
they can suppress others; they can subtly guide people to certain views.
For decades, US and German intelligence used this Swiss company's encoding devices to spy on other countries, and the revelations this week have provoked outrage. From the Cold War into the 2000s, Crypto AG sold the devices to more than 120 governments worldwide. The machines were encrypted but it emerged this week that the CIA and Germany's BND had rigged the devices so they could crack the codes and intercept thousands of messages.
It is also a country that sold flawed encryption machines, bearing that Made in Switzerland label, to Iran, so that Washington could eavesdrop.
Answering that question requires understanding the perverse way in which charges of anti-Semitism often function in the contemporary American debate over Israel. Frequently, they serve not to combat bigotry but to excuse it. In the West Bank, which Israel controls, millions of Palestinians live alongside hundreds of thousands of Jews. The Jews enjoy citizenship, free movement, due process and the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. The Palestinians enjoy none of these rights. (Defenders of the Israeli government sometimes claim that West Bank Palestinians actually live under the control of the Palestinian Authority. But the PA is not a government; it is Israel's subcontractor. When PA officials do things Israel doesn't like, Israel arrests them).
In spite of its immense global impact, Republicans and Democrats disagree on how serious a problem the coronavirus pandemic is. One likely reason is the political elites to whom partisans listen. As a means of shoring up support, President Trump has largely downplayed and but sometimes hyped the severity of the virus's toll on American lives. Do these messages influence the perceived seriousness of the virus, how the president is evaluated as well as support for and compliance with social distancing guidelines? Results suggest that Republican identifiers had already crystallized their views on the virus's seriousness, the president's performance, and social distancing policies and behaviors. Unexpectedly, information critical of President Trump's policy decisions produced a backlash causing people to show less concern about the virus's death toll and rate the president's performance even more highly.
Paul Graham, Y Combinator
What YC looks for, above all, is founders who understand some group
of users and can make what they want. This is so important that it's
YC's motto: "Make something people want."
...
Which means the conversation during your YC interview will have to
be about something new: either a new need, or a new way to satisfy
one. And not just new, but uncertain. If it were certain that the
need existed and that you could satisfy it, that certainty would be
reflected in large and rapidly growing revenues, and you wouldn't
be seeking seed funding.
In 2009, a group of scientists investigated papers that had linked
individual differences in brain activity to various personality
types. They
found
many used a type of analysis that reported only
the strongest correlations, leading to potentially coincidental
conclusions. A "disturbingly large" amount of fMRI research
on emotion and personality relied on these "seriously defective
research methods," the group wrote.
...
This year, Stanford University researchers described what happened
when they gave the same fMRI data to 70 groups of independent
neuroscientists. No two teams used the same analysis methods and,
overall, the researchers did not always come to the same conclusions
about what the data demonstrated about brain activity.
The study, one of the largest and longest-term experimental examinations to date of exercise and mortality, shows that older men and women who exercise in almost any fashion are relatively unlikely to die prematurely. But if some of that exercise is intense, the study also finds, the risk of early mortality declines even more, and the quality of people’s lives climbs.
Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) in St. Louis have spent some years investigating the links between circadian rhythm and Alzheimer's, and have recently been making some real inroads. Following a 2018 study demonstrating how disrupted sleep can accelerate the buildup of toxic plaques associated with the disease, the team has now identified a protein implicated in the progression of the disease that appears highly regulated by the circadian rhythm, helping them join the dots and providing a potential new therapeutic target.
Findings In this cohort study of 81 364 Medicare beneficiaries living in single-person households, those with ADRD were more likely to miss bill payments up to 6 years prior to diagnosis and started to develop subprime credit scores 2.5 years prior to diagnosis compared with those never diagnosed. These negative financial outcomes persisted after ADRD diagnosis, accounted for 10% to 15% of missed payments in our sample, and were more prevalent in census tracts with less college education.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor; even if I'm 100% right in my argument and you are 100% convinced by it, you shouldn't listen to me over actual doctors; it's a bad habit that might actually kill you.
So after all this we are left nothing; there's no study I can find, anywhere, which comes close to providing anything resembling strong evidence that cleaning your ears with cotton tipped swabs also blocks them.