In the land of the free, you can drop all theway down, joining the ranks of the lumpenproletariat (literally the “raggedproletariat”).

His shares of the company, a meme stock that has soared despite the company generating almost no revenue, are valued at more than $3 billion.

Remember that typewriter-typing (typewritering?) is different from keyboarding on a computer, even if the key layouts are similar between the two.

“Library hand” was a special kind ofbackward-slanting penmanship meant specically for card catalogs,and taught in library school through the 1920s.

Even OCLC, one ofthe very best retrospective-conversion contractors in the business, isbound to make thousands of typos in the course of a huge projectlike the Harvard “recon.”

“Typecasting” used to be a thing where people would type a post, scan/take a photo of it, and post it on a blog or social media

Later, she’s was doing jokes about racism, like, ‘The word bigot is a contraction for big idiot.’”

He believed in his own conception ofliberal education for all and looked upon any kind of trainingdirected to learning a trade, solely to make a living at it, asnarrowing and illiberal.

Ahmed allegedly created two fake accounts that masqueraded as "tick accounts"; accounts owned and controlled by the exchange that contained data about the liquidity provided by all liquidity providers for a particular price range.

the positive ones is we become good parents we spoke about this last time we we met uh and and it's the only outcome it's the only way I believe we can 01:14:34 create a better future

I decided to translate the German “Zettelkasten” as “Zettelkasten” since I consider this an established term.

Warblish, named and thoroughly described for the first time in this paper, is the imitation of avian vocalizations using existing words in human language.

“When I hear gaggles of people who come into the store, someone has read the book and they’re like, ‘Oh my God. You have to read this. The hero is so cute. He’s such a cinnamon roll’” — a term borrowed from fan fiction that means the male love interest is “really sweet, but he’s not a pushover.”

L.L.M.s have a disturbing propensity to just make things up out of nowhere. (The technical term for this, among deep-learning experts, is ‘‘hallucinating.’’)

Content management system (CMS) vendors have been rushing to either rebrand as “Digital Experience Platforms” (DXP for short) or position themselves as part of a “composable DXP” — a suite of marketing tools working together to handle the digital experience.

Oppressed groups aren’t always infantilised – in a process known as ‘adultification’, children from racialised minorities are typically viewed as having more agency, which makes them more likely to be criminalised– but the right is happy to deploy a diversity of tactics.

Even if I have not yet convinced you to abandon “criminal justice system” in favor of “carceral system,” I hope I have you thinking about the fact that some of our legal system’s common terms are viewed and experienced by others in non-neutral and harmful ways.

Think of it like “heteronormativity,” the idea that heterosexual couples “automatically, but inappropriately, assume all other people fit their own categories,” but for cars.

That’s because a lot of us suffer from a malady called “car brain” — though Ian Walker, a professor of environmental psychology at Swansea University in Wales, prefers to call it “motonormativity.”

In particular Erwin Schrödinger is said (Wigner (1981)) to have spoken of the Gruppenpest (German for “plague of group theory”) which ought to be abandoned. In his autobiography John Slater, an MIT physicist, claimed: It was at this point that Wigner, Hund, Heitler, and Weyl entered the picture with their “Gruppenpest”: the pest of the group theory… The authors of the “Gruppenpest” wrote papers which were incomprehensible to those like me who had not studied group theory, in which they applied these theoretical results to the study of the many electron problem. The practical consequences appeared to be negligible, but everyone felt that to be in the mainstream one had to learn about it. Yet there were no good texts from which one could learn group theory. It was a frustrating experience, worthy of the name of a pest. I had what I can only describe as a feeling of outrage at the turn which the subject had taken… As soon as this [Slaters] paper became known, it was obvious that a great many other physicists were as disgusted as I had been with the group-theoretical approach to the problem. As I heard later, there were remarks made such as “Slater has slain the ‘Gruppenpest’”. I believe that no other piece of work I have done was so universally popular.

Complaints about information overload and ‘infobesity’ are age-old phenomena, as book historian Rindert Jagersma observes. Until the invention of printing, monks and officials used to copy texts by hand, which was a slow and expensive process. But with the advent of printing presses, books and other texts became cheaper to produce and consume.

Splooting, or more technically heat dumping, is a process through which animals stretch their hind legs back and lie on cooler surfaces to reduce their body heat. It’s commonly done by squirrels and sometimes, by dogs, and it’s no reason for concern, it’s just a sign that the animal is hot and trying to cool off.

In the liner notes of “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” (1978), Eno wrote, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

The enshittification of Amazon – where you search for a specific product and get six screens of ads for different, worse ones – is the natural end-state of chokepoint capitalism: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

I also know that I have um effectively eclectomania in terms of I can click and capture stuff or clip it clip out stuff 01:26:48 faster than I can really as a minimum process it's such that oh that's an interesting link right I've read the abstract or I've read this 01:27:00 intro paragraph Yes I want that so I capture it with its URL as a minimum and I know I captured it today kleptomania that is great yeah

“Goblin mode” has been chosen by the public as the 2022 Oxford word of the year. The term, which refers to “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”, has become the first word of the year to have been decided by public vote.

And that, perhaps, is what we might get to via prebunking. Not so much attempts to counter or fact-check misinfo on the internet, but defanging the tropes that underpin the most recurringly manipulative claims so that the public sees, recognizes, & thinks:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who’scredited with the first use of the term marginalia, in 1819, coined the term as literarycriticism and to spark public dialogue.6

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes”  can occasionally generate. His actual definition is:  “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

The final thing I will say is, we have the 2016 model in our mind that, if there's a normie Republican, they get crushed by Donald Trump. Why should a Mike DeWine, not that he's going to run, but why — normie Republicans did way better than the performative Republicans.

A polycrisis is not just a situation where you face multiple crises. It is a situation like that mapped in the risk matrix, where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.

It also saw a surge in “flipping,” or customers buying an item, then selling it again a few months or weeks later.

Next is “remade,” where rolls of deadstock fabric are used to produce popular Reformation designs or vintage-inspired silhouettes.

A negroni sbagliato (which translates to wrong negroni) replaces the gin with a sparkling wine.

A negroni is traditionally made with one part gin, one part Campari, and one part sweet vermouth.

An azide is a type of molecule that contains three nitrogen atoms bound in a straight line; an alkyne contains a triple bond between carbons.

Bertozzi coined the term bioorthogonal to refer to reactions that occur without interfering with the chemistry of a living cell.

Orthogonal, which in geometry means perpendicular, refers in chemistry to reactions that can proceed independently in the same medium without affecting each other.

People from Connecticut are called “nutmeggers” because the unofficial nickname for CT is “the nutmeg state.”

“Beezer”, of course, is Joseph-speak for “Bimmer-owning geezers”, those who bought their first new BMWs for less than the current sales tax on a new BMW back when many Americans thought “BMW” meant “British Motor Works”.

An antipersona is a representation of a user group that could misuse a product in ways that negatively impact target users and the business.

A ‘shadowland’ can be defined as ‘an indeterminate borderland between places or states, typically represented as an abode of ghosts and spirits’; the word captures the haunting quality of these zones.

In this work, an inanimate spider is repurposed as a ready-to-use actuator requiring only a single facile fabrication step, initiating the area of “necrobotics” in which biotic materials are used as robotic components.

This is opposed by a hydraulic system: a chamber in the center of the spider’s body (known as a prosoma) pushes out fluid to open the leg, with separate valves allowing the animal to control each limb independently.

Google, for instance, refers to its directly employed workers as “Googlers,” and its contractors as “TVCs” (temporary, vendor or contractor).

The chosen point ofdeparture for exploring these questions is the concept of xenohospitality;a term I borrow from Helen Hester – one of the authors of theXenofeminist Manifesto – who defines it as openness to the alien, adefinition I link closely to ‘comradeliness’.

Concurrently,the jokey portmanteau ‘momrade’, i.e. mom + comrade, has circulated persistentlyin the twenty-first century on online forums maintained by communities ofmothers and/or leftists.

Awair Element,

Model C: Connected CO2 sensor with integrated battery and storage New 2022 enclosure design with modular wallmount and deskstand options Starting at 199.00$ CAD (+tx)

Despite lively discussion on the role that UV-based technologies can play in reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission [[27], [28], [29], [30]], available data on its use and impact are still scant, setting-specific and heterogeneous in terms of study design and assessed outcomes

The local tyrannosaur in the Prince Creek Formation was not a familiar species seen elsewhere, but a unique and smaller predator—roughly the size of a polar bear— that Fiorillo and colleagues dubbed Nanuqsaurus.

Francis Fukuyama has called "middleware": content-curation services that could give users more control over the material they see on internet platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.

Downsizing and shrinkflation mean the same thing Dworsky is a former Massachusetts assistant attorney general and longtime consumer advocate. He has spent decades tracking instances of companies shrinking products on his website Mouseprint. He refers to it by its original name, downsizing, but economist Pippa Malmgren rechristened it "shrinkflation" about a decade ago, and the term stuck. Downsizing and shrinkflation both refer to the same thing: companies reducing the size or quantity of their products while charging the same price or even more.

Reentering the workplace felt at once familiar and foreign, imparting a sense of day-job vu. My colleague and I crept past empty cubicles and offices, feeling a bit like scavengers or archaeologists touring a post-apocalyptic civilization that was largely unchanged except for the hand-sanitizer stations and politely worded safety signs posted everywhere.

About 50% of patients with Parkinson disease (PD) experience the sensation that someone is nearby when no one is present. Minor hallucinations including these so-called presence hallucinations often appear early in the disease course, manifesting before motor symptoms in as many as a third of patients. What’s more, PD hallucinations are associated with psychosis, cognitive decline, and death, making them a potential marker for poor clinical outcomes. Yet because many patients are reluctant to report these hallucinations and physicians may not ask about them, they often go undiagnosed. Now, a team of researchers in Europe has developed a technique to induce presence hallucinations among patients with PD in a controlled setting.

A librarian in Bologna, Italy, is invitedby a colleague in Michiganto tour her library. She is not planning any immediate travel. She plans instead to visit while sitting at her desk in her office. She downloads software on her computer and awakens a telepresence robot (TR) in Kalamazoo, MI, which becomes her eyes, ears, andlegs, allowing her to drive around the librarytaking in the sights and services and conversing with her colleague, library staff, and patrons she encounters along the way. Telepresence robottechnology offers people the opportunity to visit someone across a building or across the world without having to leave their chair.

Enter the AudioPiLe: The Hardware

Imagine buying flowers for a loved one. After selecting a bouquet, at checkout you discover that the site has sneaked a paid greeting card into your shopping cart. This is an example of a dark pattern, an interface designed to manipulate a user into behavior that goes against their best interests.

The book introduces Zemiology as a discipline that lies beyond the 'toxic language' of conventional criminology and makes the study of social harm a concern of all scholar-activists. Zemiolgy alerts scholar-activists to the fact that lots of harms around the world are legally imposed. The authors conclude that the pursuit of corporate profits at the expense of human needs is the main driver of social harms. They call for the abolition of capitalism as part of efforts towards harm-reduction. Biko Agozino, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech This book is timely and provides an easily accessible, theoretical and empirical introduction to zemiology, the discipline that seeks to unearth harmful structures, policies, decisions and practice to generate changes to confront them. After a pedagogical introduction covering the arguments in favour of zemiology as a discipline of its own, the book unpacks theoretical and empirical demonstrations that clearly underline the field’s justification. As the authors state; zemiology requires a rethink about the lens through which we view the world in which we live. This is an important book for students and others who want to look beyond criminology to understand, analyse and act against harms. Ragnhild Sollund, Professor at the University of Oslo

This book outlines key developments in understanding social harm by setting out its historical foundations and the discussions which have proliferated since. It examines various attempts to conceptualise social harm and highlights key sites of contestation in its relationship to criminology to argue that these act as the basis for an activist zemiology, one directed towards social change for social justice. The past two decades have seen a proliferation of debate related to social harm in and around criminology. From climate catastrophe and a focus on environmental harms, unprecedented deaths generating focus on border harms and the coronavirus pandemic revealing the horror of mass and arguably avoidable deaths across the globe, critical studies in social harm appear ever more pressing. Drawing on a range of international case studies of cultural, emotional, physical and economic harms, From Social Harm to Zemiology locates the study of social harm in an accessible fashion. In doing so it sets out how a zemiological lens can moves us beyond many of the problematic legacies of criminology. This book rejects criminologies which have disproportionately served to regulate intersectional groups, and which have arguably inflicted as much or more harm by bolstering the very ideologies of control in offering minor reforms that inadvertently expand and strengthen states and corporations. It does this by sketching out the contours, objects, methods and ontologies of a disciplinary framework which rejects commonplace assumptions of ‘value freedom’. From Social Harm to Zemiology advocates social change in accordance with groups who are most disenfranchised, and thus often most socially harmed.

But this wasn’t a typical set of twins, Roberts learned. Her pregnancy was diagnosed as superfetation, a rare condition in which a woman who is already pregnant conceives another baby.Doctors found a second baby during the 12-week ultrasound appointment, and after several scans, they diagnosed the pregnancy as superfetation. In this image, the larger baby is 13 weeks, while the smaller one is 10. (Courtesy of Rebecca Roberts) Roberts’s pregnancy is one of very few superfetation cases recorded in medical literature, her obstetrician, David Walker, said.

The GIF Ms. Jin sold, created by her childhood friend, an artist named Annie Zhao, is an example of something called a nonfungible token. NFTs are essentially digital collectible items (GIFs, images, memes, games, code, videos, artwork, music, games, even text) that people can buy, sell and trade. Almost any piece of digital content can be made into an NFT and have its public documentation of ownership recorded on the blockchain. Some of the ideas behind NFTs — documentation of ownership and chain of custody, scarcity, trading, valuations and speculation — are as old as markets. The innovation is the decentralization, which in turn means you can take NFTs anywhere. No one platform or middleman controls them.

Many of these laws relate specifically to hunting, says Ciara Farrell, the Club’s library and collections manager. To own a dog used for hunting, people had to have special hunting licenses, issued by the king. “All other dogs must be expeditated or hambled,” she says, “which was a pretty nasty practice whereby dogs had some claws removed or had the pad of one foot damaged.” Simply muzzling them, the book decreed, was not sufficient. Generally, only mastiffs required hambling—though, Manwood acknowledged, “there is more Danger in [greyhounds] than in Mastiffs.”

A radiograph of the pelvis showed a widening of the pubic symphysis of more than 5 cm. Also known as an open-book fracture, this injury typically occurs after high-energy blunt trauma, such as that caused in a motorcycle accident or by a fall from height.

Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking

Deep phenotyping in psychiatric research and practice is a term used to describe the collection and analysis of multiple streams of behavioral and biological data, some of this data collected around the clock, to identify and intervene in critical health events.

Silencing such a prominent activist is, in our view, part of a pattern of global violent repression againstdefenders in ecological distribution conflicts (henceforth EDCs) (Scheidelet al., 2020). EDCs refer to disputesarising from the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and costs of projects such as extractiveindustries, transport facilities, or waste dumping (Martinez-Alier and O'Connor, 1996). The origin of suchconflicts is often unequal ecological exchange (UEE) (Hornborg, 1998).

Harker’s team at the Philadelphia Fed has developed a new online tool, the Occupational Mobility Explorer, to help workers without bachelor’s degrees (whose jobs are most vulnerable to automation) identify “opportunity occupations”: new jobs they could do with only modest training or upskilling that pay significantly more than their old job. People around the country can use the tool to find opportunity occupations in their area. Across 33 metro areas, Harker found that about half of jobs can upskill into a similar job with an average annual salary increase of $15,000. “This is a tool not just for employees looking to upskill, but also for public officials looking at developing programs, community colleges, job training programs to really focus in on: Where are the jobs of the future? Where are the jobs that are growing that can move people into the middle class?” Harker said.

We all cyberloaf – and the science says that it can make us more productive at work. But when does a useful break become plain old slacking off?WWhen Stephanie Andel can feel her eyes glaze over scrolling through academic papers, institutional emails or student marking, she’ll open a new tab in her web browser and explore. “I take a few minutes every hour or two to surf the web, look at news or scan my Facebook feed to catch up with friends,” Andel, assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University Purdue University of Indianapolis, admits. She’s not alone. Research shows that workers drift from their contracted tasks to personal email, social networks and the far corners of the internet for anything between a few hours a week to a few hours a day. Six out of 10 people admit they can’t get through the workday without checking their social media, according to online learning firm Udemy, while two-thirds of us say Facebook is the biggest time-sink. This phenomenon – known as cyberloafing – is an issue that costs businesses $85bn a year through lost time, according to researchers at the University of Nevada. Cyberloafing is often presented as a negative. “Some of the early research into it was framing it as procrastination,” explains Dr Fuschia Sirois of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Psychology. “People were cyberloafing to escape.” Yet more recent research suggests that a degree of cyberloafing may be beneficial to employees; that small breaks help them refocus between tasks and even deal with workplace stress. Briefly stepping back – also known as “psychological detachment” – helps them muster energy to continue through the workday.

CECE MOORE (Genetic Genealogist): We inherit our DNA from both of our parents: 50 percent from mom, 50 percent from dad. And they inherited it from their parents; and their parents, of course, inherited it from their parents.NARRATOR: Our parents each contribute about 50 percent to our DNA. And the same is true for them and their parents. So, the amount of DNA we inherit from any ancestor drops by half with each preceding generation.We also share DNA with anyone who shares a common ancestor with us: siblings, half-siblings, first cousins, second cousins and so on. The way that the D.T.C.s determine those relationships is by comparing people’s DNA. The amount that is shared is measured in a unit called centimorgans.CECE MOORE: The more centimorgans two people share, the closer they are related. And the fewer centimorgans they share, the more distantly related they are.NARRATOR: But with the D.T.C.s, a relationship to someone can’t always be determined just by counting centimorgans, because the numbers fall within ranges. You might share the same number with a cousin and a great-uncle, for example.ELLEN GREYTAK (Parabon NanoLabs): Just because you have an amount of shared DNA doesn’t mean you actually know, for sure, what that person’s relationship is. It’s just a probability, a spectrum of possible relationships.

Bhang is the cheapest, most prevalent, and lowest-quality marijuana; it consists of crushed leaves, seeds, and/or flowers, and produces the least potent high. On the other end of the spectrum, Charas is the highest-quality and most expensive marijuana in India. It is sold as a highly potent hashish produced from plants grown in the most desirable cannabis-producing farmlands of the Hindu Kush and Himalaya mountain ranges between 4,000 to 7,000 feet. It remains one of the most revered marijuana products in the world today. Somewhere in between Bhang and Charas is Ganga. A mid-grade crop in both price and potency, Ganga is cultivated from well-cared-for female plants, and consists of a mixture of resin and cannabis flower.

This might seem self-evident when you take a second to think about it, but then why would you be thinking about this at all unless you work in the relatively booming beard care industry or you’re a pogonophile—a lover of beards and the bearded.

Taniya Bethke, who coordinates recruitment and retention efforts for the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department, said she has experience with the cultural challenges.  “There’s this dichotomy between the hippies with tie-dye T-shirts and these stereotypical rednecks wearing doe urine and camouflage,” she said. “I didn’t fit into either one of those communities.” Bethke, who took up hunting as an adult, said it wasn’t until she found a group of “hipnecks” — rural young adults who shared a commitment to sustainable food — that she felt comfortable trying it. 

Teddy came from Turks and Caicos, as did his sister, Scout. My buddy Bonnie and I were there in 2005 and had read about a dog whisperer named Jane Parker-Rauw, who since the late 1990s has been guiding tourists through the rescue process of street puppies known as potcakes. Dogs that had originally arrived by ship as far back as the early 1800s got that name after the pots with dregs of burned peas and rice put out on the stoops for them at week’s end.

One trick is to do a joint “premortem” exercise. Get together in a room, and imagine that you’re six months into the future. The feature has been built and launched and isn’t doing well. What went wrong?

In September, Gilman, who is currently a faculty fellow at the Data and Society research institute, released a report documenting all the various algorithms that poverty lawyers might encounter. Called Poverty Lawgorithms, it’s meant to be a guide for her colleagues in the field. Divided into specific practice areas like consumer law, family law, housing, and public benefits, it explains how to deal with issues raised by algorithms and other data-driven technologies within the scope of existing laws.

Miriam is a survivor of what’s known as “coerced debt,” a form of abuse usually perpetrated by an intimate partner or family member. While economic abuse is a long-standing problem, digital banking has made it easier to open accounts and take out loans in a victim’s name, says Carla Sanchez-Adams, an attorney at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. In the era of automated credit-scoring algorithms, the repercussions can also be far more devastating.

Destitution among workers can be traced in large part to the subminimum wage for tipped workers, still $2.13 an hour at the Federal level. A legacy of slavery,3 the subminimum wage for tipped workers persists in 43 states, and has subjected a largely female workforce of servers, bartenders, bussers, and others to economic instability and the highest rates of sexual harassment of any industry for decades.4

In what Jayaraman terms "maskual harassment," the phenomenon's underlying power imbalance is no different than sexual harassment, she said, when workers are reliant on the customer's tips. Demanding a service worker to take their mask off, she argued, is asking them to "subject herself to the virus and the possibility of death — for the sexual pleasure of customers, all because she doesn't get paid a minimum wage."

The fresco for a wall, for example, would be worked out first in a series of smaller sketches before the final design was drawn to full scale on huge sheets of paper (the “cartoon,” from the Italian cartone, meaning “big paper”). Cartoons came in for especially rough handling: to transfer their designs to the plaster, artists might score them with a sharp instrument, or outline the main figures with a series of pinpricks (“pouncing”), and then blow charcoal dust through the holes.

Ellis’s raw racism and Atwater’s life-threatening clapbacks (she once had to be restrained from knifing Ellis) were as much a product of their time as the careful tiptoeing we were doing in our committee.

Now an English professor at the University of South Carolina, Shields is part of an agricultural revolution with a future that lies in the past—one focused on preserving plant landraces, old cultivars that adapted to local conditions over generations.

Many landraces grown before the 1850s are hardy, able to weather both drought and flooding. Some are nutritious and packed with flavors prized by high-end restaurants and specialty retailers. For example, Carolina Gold rice, milled and sold by Anson Mills in Columbia, makes other white rice taste like paste. “Landraces are genetically diverse, so they’re not bottlenecked,” Shields says. “They were bred for taste, not for mass production.”

In cryologist-speak, the flaw lead is an opening that runs between ice attached to the coast (shore-fast ice) and the ice on the sea (drift ice). The flaw leads are unpredictable: during the autumn they can form anywhere in the frozen ocean where wind or currents place stress on the ice, and they often freeze over again. To find them, look up in the sky: a flaw may be indicated by steam rising from the water, or the dark reflection of the water on a cloud. Hunters often head out over the fast ice to the flaw lead in search of the mammals—seals, whales and narwhals—that gather there to breathe. With the same object in mind, polar bears will arrive over the drift ice. The flaw is an aberration, but also a rich resource; its fault line, a meeting point. —Nancy Campbell, The Library of Ice, 2018

Until now, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Covid-19 task force has had to prepare its battle plan without the keys to the government agencies leading the pandemic response.That changes this week, when Mr. Biden can finally dispatch what are known as landing teams to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.

He knew from other viruses that fomite spread—the technical term for passing on a virus via objects—was possible, and at that time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had little guidance on SARS-CoV-2.

Oyster eggs, having become larvae, attach themselves to rocks, or to whatever ‘culch’ or artificial surface human beings lay down for them – old roof-tiles were used as a traditional oyster-base in Arcachon.

Those who spread misinformation—false content shared by a person who does not realize it is false or misleading—are driven by sociopsychological factors. People are performing their identities on social platforms to feel connected to others, whether the “others” are a political party, parents who do not vaccinate their children, activists who are concerned about climate change, or those who belong to a certain religion, race or ethnic group. Crucially, disinformation can turn into misinformation when people share disinformation without realizing it is false. Read Our Latest Issue

SEC. 747. ANTIDISRUPTIVE PRACTICES AUTHORITY. Section 4c(a) of the Commodity Exchange Act (7 U.S.C. 6c(a)) (as amended by section 746) is amended by adding at the end the following: ‘‘(5) DISRUPTIVE PRACTICES.—It shall be unlawful for any person to engage in any trading, practice, or conduct on or subject to the rules of a registered entity that— ‘‘(A) violates bids or offers; ‘‘(B) demonstrates intentional or reckless disregard for the orderly execution of transactions during the closing period; or ‘‘(C) is, is of the character of, or is commonly known to the trade as, ‘spoofing’ (bidding or offering with the intent to cancel the bid or offer before execution).

Spoofing is an illegal form of market manipulation in which a trader places a large order to buy or sell a financial asset, such as a stock, bond or futures contract, with no intention of executing. By doing so, the trader—or "the spoofer"—creates an artificial impression of high demand for the asset. Simultaneously, the trader places hundreds or even thousands of smaller orders for the same asset, profiting on the increase in price brought about by the large fake order, which is then cancelled. Spoofing is also known as bluffing, and has been around for decades as traders attempt to take advantage of other market players by artificially inflating—or deflating, as the case may be—the price of an asset. The technique has perhaps become more common, or at least gained more notoriety, in the 2010s because of the advent of speedy, high-volume and computer-driven trading systems. During this time, it also attracted the notice of securities regulators and law enforcement officials.[1] Spoofing is considered manipulative because the trader would not have achieved the price on the actual orders without first obtaining that price by virtue of the large bogus order.

According to the Plaintiffs' allegations, in or around 2003, two of MIVA's top revenue-generating distribution partners (“Saveli” and “Dmitri”)—who together generated almost one-third of MIVA's revenue during 2003, 2004, and 2005, and represented about 36 percent of MIVA's click revenue (id. ¶¶ 40–41)—began using click fraud to generate revenue.   Saveli and Dmitri's click fraud included the use of spyware, browser hijacking software, and other non-human traffic.  (Id. ¶ 43).   According to a former Business Development Manager at MIVA, Saveli and Dmitri were “turn and burn guys” who focused primarily on driving in a lot of traffic, regardless of its quality.

A “fraud on the market” occurs when a material misrepresentation is knowingly disseminated to an informationally efficient market.  Basic, 485 U.S. at 247.   Just as an efficient market translates all available truthful information into the stock price, the market processes the publicly disseminated falsehood and prices it into the stock as well.   See id. at 241–42, 243–44, 246–47.   The market price of the stock will then include an artificial “inflationary” value—the amount that the market mistakenly attributes to the stock based on the fraudulent misinformation.   So long as the falsehood remains uncorrected, it will continue to taint the total mix of available public information, and the market will continue to attribute the artificial inflation to the stock, day after day.   If and when the misinformation is finally corrected by the release of truthful information (often called a “corrective disclosure”), the market will recalibrate the stock price to account for this change in information, eliminating whatever artificial value it had attributed to the price.   That is, the inflation within the stock price will “dissipate.”

“Click fraud” generally refers to the practice of clicking on an Internet advertisement for the sole purpose of forcing the advertiser to pay for the click.  (Id. ¶ 43).   Because advertisers only pay when someone clicks through to their website, artificial clicks can be very costly to advertisers.  (Id.) Click fraud includes the use of illicit practices such as spyware, browser hijacking software, and other “bots” or “non-human traffic.” 3  (Id. ¶¶ 43–44).   Such practices result in lower sales conversion rates for advertisers because the leads are false—they do not come from actual buyers interested in purchasing the advertised products.  (Id. ¶ 26).   Because lower conversion rates lead to lower advertiser bids and thus to decreased revenue, ensuring the quality of its distribution partners and eliminating improper Internet traffic are extremely important for a pay-per-click company such as MIVA.

ON THE OPENING NIGHT OF every Broadway musical, a constant flow of flowers, balloons and gifts swirls past the stage door and into the theater. As the presents begin to spill into the corridors outside the dressing rooms, the oldest and most beloved gift arrives: the Gypsy Robe.The robe is Broadway history made visible. It travels from musical to musical in a tradition stretching back more than 45 years. Every Broadway show with a chorus of dancers and singers, known in the business as gypsies, takes part when its opening night arrives.

Upgrading RAM

Henrich is a cultural anthropologist but he wants to do it right, with controls, experiments, statistics and factual claims that can be shown to be right or wrong. In 1960 the field of cliometrics was born, history done with large data sets and statistics, and Henrich wants to show just how far this approach can be pushed. Traditional historians and the more informal cultural anthropologists will see themselves being confronted with a methodology few of them use and challenged to defend their impressionistic hypotheses against his lab-based results.

Experts who don’t have the technical tools — historians and anthropologists especially — have an important role to play as well; they should scour the book for any instances of Occam’s broom (with which one sweeps inconvenient facts under the rug). This can be an innocent move, since Henrich himself, in spite of the astonishing breadth of his scholarship, is not expert in all of these areas and may simply be ignorant of important but little-known exceptions to his generalizations. His highly detailed and confident relaying of historical and anthropological facts impresses me, but what do I know? You can’t notice what isn’t mentioned unless you’re an expert.

Once upon a time there was a German psychologist whose name I am forgetting—which will, itself, become relevant in just a moment—who argued that when you don’t name a thing it stays more active in your mind. Specifically, he found that you have better recall for the details of an unsolved task, an unfinished puzzle, an unnamed psychological phenomenon, than a solved or labeled thing. “Loose ends prevail” could have been the name of his law, but it was—I’m checking my notes—the Zeigarnik effect. The man’s name was Zeigarnik and she was a woman not a man and she was Russian, not German. But still. It has stayed with me, this idea with a hard-to-remember name about how unnamed ideas are easier to remember. This rabid little law that suggests that unlabeled things gnaw and tug at you with more vigor, their parts and powers somehow more alive when they are left to roam wild, outside of the confines of our words.

For philanthropists of the past, charity was often a matter of simply giving money away. For the philanthrocapitalists - the new generation of billionaires who are reshaping the way they give - it's like business. Largely trained in the corporate world, these "social investors" are using big-business-style strategies and expecting results and accountability to match. Bill Gates, the world's richest man, is leading the way: he has promised his entire fortune to finding a cure for the diseases that kill millions of children in the poorest countries in the world. In Philanthrocapitalism, Matthew Bishop and Michael Green examine this new movement and its implications. Proceeding from interviews with some of the most powerful people on the planet-including Gates, Bill Clinton, George Soros, Angelina Jolie, and Bono, among others-they show how a web of wealthy, motivated donors has set out to change the world. Their results will have huge implications: In a climate resistant to government spending on social causes, their focused donations may be the greatest force for societal change in our world, and a source of political controversy.