Month: October 2019

Enlarge / Hurricane damage in Puerto Rico. (credit: Yuisa Rios/FEMA)

With the warming climate, we should expect a change in weather-related disasters. Fewer cold snaps and stronger heat waves are the obvious issues. But we should also see more intense storms, as a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, while droughts may intensify in areas where rain was already sparse as the heat bakes water out of the soil.

All that suggests the costs of weather disasters will be different—but not necessarily better or worse. Researchers who have tried to study the topic have come up with very mixed results: some show an upward trend in the cost of natural disasters, while others fiercely dispute these analyses. Now, a new study suggests a possible reason for this: while the average damage caused by disasters is staying relatively stable, the most extreme events are increasing rapidly. But in a small bit of consolation, the human costs may be dropping.

A confused literature

It might seem that analyzing the cost of weather disasters would be simple: identify the disasters, total the cost, and see if there's a trend over time in the warming world. But the reality is more complex. One complication is obvious: offsetting effects. Heat waves are going up in a warming world, but cold snaps are dropping. If these changes have offsetting costs, you could see no effect even as the dynamics shift.

Enlarge (credit: Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica)

RESTON, VIRGINIA—A Boston-based startup called Optimus Ride has launched a new self-driving vehicle service in the Washington, DC suburb of Reston, Virginia. On Monday, I traveled to the site, a 45-minute drive from my home in the nation's capital, to see it first-hand.

Since August, the company has been ferrying passengers between a Fannie Mae office building at the site and an overflow parking lot a few minutes' walk away. But Optimus Ride has much larger ambitions for the site.

The 36-acre property is directly adjacent to a new stop ("Reston Town Center") on the DC Metro system's Silver Line. The site's owner, Brookfield Properties, is planning a massive mixed-use development here it has dubbed Halley Rise. There will be new homes, office space, and retail stores—including a Wegmans grocery store.

Enlarge / You, too, can become a Director of Disorder. (credit: Yle)

Half of the battle against disinformation campaigns is educating people about how they work. And that's why the Finnish public broadcasting company Yle—Finland's equivalent of the BBC—has created a game called Troll Factory. The game, which recently won the European Journalism Centre's and Google News Initiative's Global Youth and News Media Prize for promoting media literacy, puts the player in the role of a disinformation operative working for an Internet Research Agency-like organization with an anti-immigrant agenda.

The gamification of education on disinformation campaigns has been shown to help build up a resistance to fake news in the past. The University of Cambridge conducted a study in 2018 using a browser game called "Bad News" and found that completing the 15-minute game increased "psychological resistance" to fake news on social media, reducing the perceived credibility of fake news headlines by an average of 21 percent across 15,000 participants.

Troll Factory takes Bad News' approach one step further by using real samples of memes, conspiracy theories and fake news articles used in such campaigns to infect social media and heighten the polarization of public discourse around the world—and in the US and Western Europe in particular. With the increasing reliance on social media for news, Yle's interactive team sought to create more awareness of how weaponized social media has become and more understanding among social media users of how they could be drawn into unintentionally spreading false information.