Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a one-third chance of showers in the afternoon, and a high of sixty-five. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:17 PM, for 12h 50m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Fire Department has a scheduled business meeting at 6 PM, and her Landmarks Commission also has a meeting scheduled at 6 PM.
On this day in 1927, television pioneer Philo Farnsworth achieves a breakthrough: “On September 7, 1927, Farnsworth’s image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, to a receiver in another room of his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco.[22] Pem Farnsworth recalled in 1985 that her husband broke the stunned silence of his lab assistants by saying, “There you are — electronic television!”[22] ” On this day in 1977, Wisconsin has her first judicial recall election: “Dane County citizens voted Judge Archie Simonson out of office. Simonson called rape a normal male reaction to provocative female attire and modern society’s permissive attitude toward sex. He made this statment while explaining why he sentenced a 15-year-old to only one year of probation for raping a 16-year-old girl. After the recall election, Simonson was replaced by Moria Krueger, the first woman judge elected in Dane County history. ”
Recommended for reading in full —
Vindu Goel and Scott Shane report that Fake Russian Facebook Accounts Bought $100,000 in Political Ads:
SAN FRANCISCO — Providing new evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Facebook disclosed on Wednesday that it had identified more than $100,000 worth of divisive ads on hot-button issues purchased by a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin.
Most of the 3,000 ads did not refer to particular candidates but instead focused on divisive social issues such as race, gay rights, gun control and immigration, according to a post on Facebook by Alex Stamos, that company’s chief security officer. The ads, which ran between June 2015 and May 2017, were linked to some 470 fake accounts and pages the company said it had shut down.
Facebook officials said the fake accounts were created by a Russian company called the Internet Research Agency, which is known for using “troll” accounts to post on social media and comment on news websites….
Michelle Castillo reports that Facebook gave special counsel Robert Mueller data on Russian ads, report says:
Facebook has turned over all information about ads “likely” purchased by Russian operatives to special counsel Robert Mueller, according to a report.
A source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Wednesday that the social media giant had sent the former FBI director data including copies of the ads and the identity of the buyers. That report followed news that an internal Facebook investigation found it is agents of the Kremlin may have spent $100,000 on ads with “divisive messages” between June 2015 and May 2017.
A Facebook blog post published on Wednesday said the operation involved 3,000 separate ads over a two-year period and was likely to have been run out of Russia. In addition, Facebook found 470 affiliated fake accounts and pages….
Meanwhile, Lara O’Reilly reports that Facebook’s Claimed Reach in the U.S. Is Larger Than Census Figures, Analyst Finds:
Facebook ’s FB 0.80%? measurement metrics face scrutiny again after a research analyst found the social network’s advertising platform claims to reach millions more users among specific age groups in the U.S. than the official census data show reside in the country.
Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser found Facebook’s Ad Manager claims to reach a potential audience of 41 million 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S., whereas census data, most recently updated with a population estimate in 2016, indicates there are only 31 million people of that age group.
Similarly, among the 25- to-34-year-old age group, another key demographic for advertisers, Facebook’s potential reach estimate is also out of whack with census data. Facebook claims its platform can reach 60 million people in the U.S. in that category, while the census figure is 45 million.
In a statement, a Facebook spokeswoman said the company’s audience reach estimates “are based on a number of factors, including Facebook user behaviors, user demographics, location data from devices, and other factors.” She added, “They are not designed to match population or census estimates. We are always working to improve our estimates”….
(If Facebook should be struggling with basic metrics, it may not have a firm understanding of the true number of secretive Russian trolls who’ve used the platform to propagandize.)
From March, Alexey Kovalev reports that Russia’s Infamous ‘Troll Factory’ Is Now Posing as a Media Empire (“A Russian ‘troll factory’ rebranded itself as a network of legitimate news sites. But hasn’t quite abandoned its old ways”):
Russia’s infamous troll factory — the most successful weapon in its information war arsenal — has rebranded itself as an emerging media conglomerate, an investigation by the Russian news website RBC has revealed.
The secretive troll factory, which garnered massive scrutiny from news organizations both at home and abroad in the past two years, now consists of several websites that produce original reporting and analysis with a strong “patriotic” slant, RBC reported.
The hub of these media operations is a website called FAN (Federal News Agency) whose offices in St. Petersburg are just a stone’s throw from the troll factory’s original location on Savushkina street….
Astro Teller speaks on Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not Scary: