Month: August 2019

Enlarge / YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California. (credit: JasonDoiy | Getty)

In The New York Times, reporters Max Fisher and Amanda Taub explain how YouTube propelled the career of controversial Brazilian politician Jair Bolsonaro. Before his election as Brazil's president, they write, Bolsonaro "had long used the platform to post hoaxes and conspiracies."

Ostensibly, YouTube's recommendation algorithms are politically neutral. However, they're optimized to boost "engagement," and in practice that means promoting videos with extremist and conspiratorial points of view. In Brazil, that has meant bringing a cadre of far-right social media stars to prominence, ultimately helping them gain power in national politics.

According to the Times, Brazilians are also increasingly turning to "Dr. YouTube"—relying on YouTube videos rather than conventional professionals for medical advice.

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump speaks alongside Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar at the White House May 9, 2019 in Washington DC. (credit: Getty | Alex Wong)

Canadians are in a kerfuffle over the Trump administration’s preliminary plan to allow Americans to import lower-cost prescription medications from Canada.

The plan was announced July 31 and is part of the administration’s long-sought effort to drag down the US’s skyrocketing drug prices. But it’s a long way from being a reality. Even if the plan does pan out, it will likely be years before regulators review, approve, and scale up efforts to import drugs.

Still, Canadians are infuriated by the idea and already brainstorming ways to toss it down the garburator, according to a report by health-news outlet STAT. Many fear that American importation would exacerbate current drug shortages in Canada.

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  This gallery serves as a reminder of the Minecraft that could have been. It looked incredible. [credit: Mojang / Sam Machkovech ]

After announcing a plan to completely overhaul Minecraft's visual engine in 2017, the game's developers at Mojang have finally come clean: the "Super Duper Graphics Pack" is no longer coming to the hugely popular sandbox game.

The update's E3 2017 announcement sent tongues wagging thanks to an incredible trailer, which bathed the game's familiar, blocky environs with a newly dynamic shadow-and-light model, crepuscular rays, screen-space reflections, material-based lighting, and more. Keeping in line with its description as a "pack," the update left the game's raw assets untouched, which made it seem similar to other existing "texture packs" sold within modern Minecraft games. All of this would even run in 4K resolution on supported hardware, Mojang said, and it promised a free launch by "fall 2017."

Once that date slipped, Mojang became wholly mum about the pack's existence until Monday. That's when Mojang confirmed the project's cancellation in a brief, official blog post. In it, the company told fans, "Unfortunately, the pack proved too technically demanding to implement as planned." Instead of offering technical details, Mojang went on to blame the update's problems on "how the pack performed across devices."

Eddie Murphy is all pimped out and ready to rid his community of evildoers in the first trailer for the comic biopic, Dolemite Is My Name. It's Director Craig Brewer's tribute to Rudy Ray Moore, a singer, dancer, and comedian in the 1960s and 1970s who went on to make a classic of blaxploitation film. (NB: The trailer is not entirely safe for workplace viewing.)

Moore claimed he got the idea for the Dolemite character while working in a Hollywood record store, where one of the locals used to tell obscene tall tales about a man named Dolemite. Moore adapted the persona into his act and released three albums of his frequently raunchy material accompanied by jazz and R&B musicians. Because of his delivery style (which typically involved rhyming lyrics), Moore is often called the "Godfather of Rap." (Snoop Dogg, who has a cameo in the biopic, has said, "Without Rudy Ray Moore, there would be no Snoop Dogg, and that's for real.")

Moore slowly built up a cult following, despite the fact that his albums (including the cover art) were much too vulgar to be publicly displayed in record stores. With the rise of "blaxploitation" films in the early 1970s, Moore saw an opportunity to bring the character Dolemite to the moviegoing masses. He financed his first film himself with royalties from his record sales. The result was the instant blaxploitation classic Dolemite, released in 1975, about "the ultimate ghetto hero" in the tradition of Shaft. Dolemite knew kung-fu, was a sharp dresser, was known for his sexual prowess, and was committed to ridding his neighborhood of criminal influences. The film's success spawned several sequels, although Moore's material never really made it to the mainstream.

Enlarge / A Frontier Communications van. (credit: Getty Images | jetcityimage)

Frontier Communications customers are reporting more outages and longer repair times, and state government officials have decided to investigate.

NY Public Service Commission (PSC) staff reported "that several Frontier Communications subsidiaries have significant service-quality problems, including escalating complaint rates, lengthy repair durations, and localized network reliability issues," a PSC announcement Thursday said.

PSC staff is seeking more detailed information from Frontier on customer trouble reports and "will work with Frontier to develop and implement a plan to improve poor localized network reliability conditions," the announcement said.

Enlarge / Cold Weather for the Midwest on January 29, 2019. (credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

A lot has been made of the possibility that the loss of Arctic sea ice could make mid-latitude weather weirder by causing wriggling meanders in the jet stream. One possible manifestation of that is bitter cold snaps in winter, as Arctic air slides south along with the jet stream boundary. There is a correlation between cold mid-latitude winters and low sea ice cover in the Arctic. But does the one really cause the other?

The possible relationship between a warming Arctic and changing behavior of the jet stream is still a matter of real scientific debate. For a number of reasons, it’s a difficult question to resolve. In this case, a team led by the University of Exeter’s Russell Blackport tried to disentangle the chain of events with a clever analysis.

Checking causality

Ultimately, the question is whether shrinking sea ice allows the ocean to warm the atmosphere, or whether the warm air forms separately and then melts the sea ice. The researchers used a pair of climate models and global maps of observed weather; the measurement gaps were filled in by simulated physics. First, the team categorized each winter in North America and Asia based on two measures: cooler or warmer mid-latitude temperatures and lower or higher Arctic sea ice. As in other studies, they found a correlation between the two.

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It could soon become easier for Android users to securely log in to Web accounts. Starting today, Google is rolling out a service that lets people on version 7 and later of Google’s mobile operating system use their device’s fingerprint or screen lock instead of a password when visiting certain Google services.

For now, the service is available only for Google’s Password Manager property, and even then it's only when people are using select Android models. Over the next few days, the feature will be available to all Android 7 and above devices. Google has no timeline for when people will be able to use the feature when signing in to Gmail, other Google properties, or for non-Google sites.

The new sign-in method uses the industry-wide FIDO2, W3C WebAuthn, and FIDO CTAP standards jointly developed over the past few years by a long list of companies. The standards are designed to wean the world off its reliance on passwords by making it easier to use other authentication factors such as physical security keys, fingerprints, or other biometrics.