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August 2021 - Things of Interest


Zoom reaches $85M settlement in ‘Zoombombing’ lawsuit and Amazon’s Fire TV Cube now supports Zoom calls on your TV [I’ll pass on that but it could be helpful for people]…and Zoom dysmorphia is following us into the real world. Eighteen months of using front-facing cameras has distorted our self-image – and a new study reveals that the effects aren't going away easily

Square to buy Australian giant Afterpay for $29 billion as buy now, pay later booms

The US SEC needs more power from Congress to fully regulate crypto

Why is tech illustration stuck on repeat? Ask the overworked, underpaid illustrators

The promise of open-source intelligence. It is a welcome threat to malefactors and governments with something to hide

Clickbait is unreasonably effective

The endgame for Cryptocurrency

A major Einstein theory was just proven right, 106 years later. In 1905, Albert Einstein wrote a paper that was just two pages long. It changed physics forever. And what is multiverse theory?

Does technology have a soul? And why are hyperlinks blue?

A bad solar storm could cause an 'Internet Apocalypse.' The undersea cables that connect much of the world would be hit especially hard by a coronal mass ejection

Microsoft is threatening to withhold Windows 11 updates if your CPU is old. The loophole has a loophole

PAPER: Adjusting to the digital: societal outcomes and consequences

France has hit Google with fines totalling €720 million this year. The money is meaningless – but the changes could be profound

Google could pay Apple nearly $15 billion this year to remain the default search engine on iOS. The growing payments may raise a few eyebrows among antitrust regulators

PAPER: Selling Impressions: Efficiency vs. Competition

The pop singers with the biggest vocabularies

The Best Year in Music. A journey through every Billboard top 5 hit to find music’s greatest era

Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” passes one billion views

Is Scarlett Johansson the face of a new showbiz revolution? Not quite

BBC on the best TV shows of 2021 so far

I’m sick of reboots and rewatches and you should be too. We've all spent the pandemic in a pop culture feedback loop

Charlie Watts, Rolling Stones Drummer, dies at 80. Rock’s ultimate drum god didn’t want the spotlight. He was there to do a job, which was knocking people off their feet, night after night, year after year.

What exactly are dieting apps doing with all your data? Privacy International’s new report shows how three dieting apps are collecting a lot of personal and medical data and may be sharing it with third parties

Big Tech call centre workers face pressure to accept home surveillance. Workers at one of the world’s largest call centre companies said additional monitoring would violate the privacy of their families in their homes

The most surveilled cities in the world

The FBI’s warning to Silicon Valley: China and Russia are trying to turn your employees into spies

PAPER: The Economics of Privacy: A Primer Especially for Policymakers

What’s the matter with book reviews?

How to remember what you read

PepsiCo to sell Tropicana and other juice brands for $3.3 billion

Biden pushes for electric vehicles to make up half of U.S. auto sales by 2030

While Aramco posts nearly 300% leap in second-quarter profit as oil demand recovers

The rise and fall of Polaroid

Amazon’s office workers now won’t return until early 2022. The previous plan had workers returning in September

PAPER: Strategies to manage the risks faced by consumers in developing e-commerce

PAPER: Digital Divide and the Platform Economy: Looking for the Connection from the Asian Experience

We need a new philosophy of progress

PAPER: “An Elephants’ Graveyard”: the Deregulation of American Industry in the Late Twentieth Century

PAPER: The Evolution of Market Power in the US Auto Industry

55 most insane photos from the Tokyo Olympics show the absolute joy and heartbreak of incredible performances often over in a matter of seconds

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases the first in a series of updates on its global warming assessment. The world is warming faster than expected, with temperatures likely to exceed key benchmarks before 2040

And Quartz read the 4,000-page IPCC climate report so you don’t have to

The best-selling vehicles in the world by country

SpaceX launching satellite to display billboard ads in space. You'll be able to purchase advertising space using Dogecoin

And visualising the gravitational pull of the planets

The World’s fastest growing cities

 

The newest UNESCO World Heritage Sites, in photos. A look at the newly added cultural and natural heritage sites—from Italy to India

History and the recognition of the Taliban. As the Taliban return, Afghanistan's past threatens its future. The freedoms Afghans have gained since 2001 are in jeopardy as extremists complete their takeover of the nation, spurred by U.S. exit

Why the US-trained Afghan National Army have been defeated with ease by the Taliban

And three major networks devoted [only] a full five minutes to Afghanistan in 2020. It should be no surprise then, that Americans are shocked at the images of violence and the grim political situation on the ground today.

Copenhagen has overtaken Tokyo and Singapore as the world’s safest city

The world at war in 2021

Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s tell employees to get vaccinated before coming back to work

Moderna says a third shot of its COVID-19 vaccine may be needed to protect against variants. Its current two-shot vaccine is 93 percent effective after six months

How will the Coronavirus evolve? Delta won’t be the last variant. What will the next ones bring? And how does COVID-19 affect the brain?

Want to learn more about CRISPR without having to sift through the internet? And is CRISPR the future or undoing of humanity? [hear Walter Isaacson]

How The Immune System ACTUALLY Works

Ultraprocessed foods now comprise 2/3 of calories in children and teen diets. kids and teens eat less unprocessed and minimally processed foods

Every single cognitive bias in one infographic

Our brains perceive our environment differently when we're lying down

When positivity turns toxic. “Good vibes only” has become a rallying cry. But how much positivity is too much?

Can companies with remote management succeed? James Heskett considers both sides of the debate

PAPER: Digital transformation, COVID-19, and the future of work

Declined invitations go over more graciously when lack of money is cited instead of lack of time

‘Totally new’ idea suggests longer days on early Earth set stage for complex life

Robots are coming for the lawyers – which may be bad for tomorrow’s attorneys but great for anyone in need of cheap legal assistance

Once an addict, always an addict?

The simple genius of the Interstate Highway system

Psychology has struggled for a century to make sense of the mind. Research has been messy and contentious, but has led to intriguing insights.

Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid and why is it so hard to be rational? The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be.

We are effectively alone in the universe

The COVID-19 pandemic, like other catastrophes before it, got some of us hooked on phobic energy and terror. Why?

The secret lives of Mosquitoes, the world’s most hated insects

Here’s Harper’s Index for October 2021

Andrew Cuomo’s report on his inappropriate behaviour released. Why his job is more vulnerable to scandal than Donald Trump’s was

The fugitive and the chameleon. Fifty years ago, a shooting that nearly killed police officer Daril Cinquanta set in motion a decades long chase across the American West

R. Kelly goes on trial

Kevin Kelly makes the case for optimism

‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ teach people to express more outrage online

Wikipedia has a language problem. Here’s how to fix it. Wikipedia’s non-English editions are vulnerable to manipulation and abuse

Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?

TikTok is the new Facebook – and it is shaping the future of tech in its image

How social media helped ‘Taliban 2.0’ take control of Afghanistan. The modern, tech-savvy Taliban aren’t the same as they were 20 years ago. Now they’re using the internet to control the narrative—and assert their dominance

How social media redesigns manipulate us

How Americans feel about ‘cancel culture’ and offensive speech in 6 charts

America’s most searched and visited news sites by State

Forbes’ 7th Annual List of America’s richest self-made women

DOJ repatriates looted “Dream of Gilgamesh” tablet, other artifacts to Iraq

How we spent our time in 2020 vs 2019. To slow the spread of Covid-19, we shifted our everyday activities

Improvements since the 1990s. A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers

60 years ago, the Berlin Wall went up, dividing the city — and more. Why the Berlin Wall lives on in German minds. Sixty years on, politicians have made East-West divisions worse

People sound off on what do they consider the biggest threat to humanity

Amazon killed the Name Alexa. Parents are fleeing from a name that can be, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, associated with subservience

And is your name ruining your life? Name discrimination is alive and well in 2021

Parents are not okay. We’re not even at a breaking point anymore. We’re broken

The big money behind the big lie. Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.

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