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Category: Media

News: They don’t care about accuracy

News: They don’t care about accuracy

Clarke, club president of CARE, said his interest is transmitting using LP or “low power” apparatus. John Laybourne, vice president of the Rogue Valley Amateur Radio Club, used a high-power 10,000 watt setup needing a gas-powered generator for the off-the-grid event. Source: In era of Wi-Fi and LTE, ham radio enthusiasts don’t mind a challenge | The Columbian Depending on license class, band and geographic location, the limits are 5 watts, 50 watts, 200 watts or 1,500 watts peak-envelope-power, not…

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News: How poor reporting becomes propaganda

News: How poor reporting becomes propaganda

Reporters and statistics rarely work well together: In 2018, the average premium on the exchange was $5,798.83 and for 2019, companies are proposing to sell products with an average premium of $6,274.08. Source: 2019 insurance on the Obamacare exchange in Ohio will increase | cleveland.comAn average provides useful information about a random distribution – ACA premiums are not a random distribution. ACA premiums are a non-linear distribution. When prices are across a non-linear curve, the average tells us little about…

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News: Click bait versus actual news headline

News: Click bait versus actual news headline

I’m so old, I was taught that a news headline encapsulated a brief summary of the news article. Today, the purpose of a headline is to act as “click bait”. This screen capture from Google News illustrates the concept – the one at the bottom is the “old school” approach. The past week has seen a flood of “news” reports about immigration issues-some were mostly correct yet some, may be many, were poorly researched, left out context, and were intended…

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News: When is a scientific study, or the reporting on it, just propaganda?

News: When is a scientific study, or the reporting on it, just propaganda?

Today’s news brings the following announcement: By modifying their lifestyle, including diet and exercise, people can lower their blood pressure just as effectively as with medication, according to a study. Researchers studied the effects of adapting the Newstart Lifestyle program, which includes a vegan diet, daily outside walks, substantial quantities of water, adequate daily sleep and optional spiritual activities. Source: Healthier lifestyle as effective as medication to lower blood pressure, study says – UPI.com Most people will read only the…

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Computer algorithms that analyze #Facebook “Likes” understand your thinking better than your spouse #DeleteFacebook #Privacy

Computer algorithms that analyze #Facebook “Likes” understand your thinking better than your spouse #DeleteFacebook #Privacy

Facebook (and Youtube and Twitter) have conducted a global experiment on human populations without consent of the guinea pigs by analyzing our “Likes”. Facebook’s digital model of us is more accurate than our own understanding of ourselves. Computers need evaluate as few as 100 Likes to make a judgement more effective than a human. Analyzing just 300 Likes enables the model to know more about the subject than does the subject’s spouse. Computer models achieve “peak” accuracy when more than…

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How media manipulates your interpretation of a news story

How media manipulates your interpretation of a news story

Nearly every story on Facebook this week has featured this Getty Images photo of Zuckerberg looking contrite: The photo first appeared in the press in about May of 2017. In other words, this photo is about one year old. The media has deliberately selected an old photo of Zuckerberg to make it look like he is contrite and feeling badly about the current predicament of Facebook. This assertion, however, is made up entirely by fiction writers in the media. We…

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National Geographic admits to being a racist, mysognist "click bait" fake news operation for a century

National Geographic admits to being a racist, mysognist "click bait" fake news operation for a century

The headline to this post sounds like a headline from The Onion, but its not. National Geographic admits to exploiting their staffs own racism and misogyny to spin their stories to increase readership, the same concept as modern fake news click-bait operations: People of colour were often scantily clothed, people of colour were usually not seen in cities, people of colour were not often surrounded by technologies of automobiles, airplanes or trains or factories,” he said. “People of colour were…

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90% of all Youtube views go to the top 3% of Youtube channels

90% of all Youtube views go to the top 3% of Youtube channels

The top three percent of channels got 64 percent of all views in 2006. A decade later, the top channels took 90 percent. The median views per video has plummeted to 89 in 2016 from 10,262 a decade earlier Source: Almost No One Is Making a Living on YouTube | NDTV Gadgets360.com There is now so much content on Youtube that it is very difficult for new channels to get noticed unless they have a promotional budget, outside connections, or…

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Photojournalism awards “glamorize pain and suffering” and warp our view of the world

Photojournalism awards “glamorize pain and suffering” and warp our view of the world

A photographers notices that almost all photo journalism awards go to photographers who focus on pain and suffering, giving us a warped view of the world around us: Media reinforces and shapes public perception whether intended or not. And the same photos and photographers tend to win multiple awards in a given year, thus generations of photojournalists are led to believe that contest-worthy images must conform to a certain look-and-feel. This isn’t just conjecture. A well-known documentary photography who eschews…

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The story behind the fake DPRK News Service Twitter account

The story behind the fake DPRK News Service Twitter account

The DPRK News Service is one of the funniest Twitter accounts in existence as it hilariously makes fun of North Korea and a host of world leaders and events. It’s run by 2 guys in the U.S. who launched it to share jokes between friends. Not long after launching it, the U.S. media repeatedly cites them as an official North Korean news service. “It feels like all online media outlets have prioritized being First rather than Right, like it’s some…

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