Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 6:31 PM, for 11h 35m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 945.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1941, The Maltese Falcon premieres in New York City.
On this day in 1862, the 17th Wisconsin Infantry fights at Corinth: “On this date at Corinth, the 17th Wisconsin Infantry, also known as the Irish Brigade, led a bayonet charge with the Gaelic battle cry “Faugh a ballagh!” or “Clear the Way.” The 17th Wisconsin Infantry unit also participated in the Atlanta campaign and the March to the Sea during the Civil War, and was disbanded at the end of the war. [Source: Bishops to Bootleggers: A Biographical Guide to Resurrection Cemetery, p.94]”
Recommended for reading in full —
Steve Kovach observes that Facebook’s response to fake Russian ads is not going to cut it:
Last month the company disclosed that it found about 3,000 ads that ran during the 2016 US election that were run by fake accounts linked to Russia. While the company hasn’t shown the ads publicly, there’s evidence that they were designed to influence voters by promoting polarizing topics. It was a wild abuse of Facebook’s automated ad platform.
Facebook’s answer: Throw bodies at the problem.
Facebook announced on Monday that it would hire 1,000 people in the coming months to monitor automated ads on the social network and remove those that don’t meet its guidelines. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s almost the same response Facebook had in May after a string of incidents where users live-streamed suicides and killings. Facebook said then that it would hire 3,000 new content moderators on top of the 4,500 it already had.
In addition to the 1,000 new hires announced Monday, Facebook said it’s going to beef up its algorithms using machine learning to automatically detect abusive ads.
Ignoring the obvious fact that these moves come far too late, there’s still a massive lack of transparency about what Facebook says will make its advertising more transparent.
Here’s what we still don’t know:
Are the new employees who will be monitoring content full time staffers or contractors?
Where are they based?
What kind of training will they go through and what specifically are they looking for?
What kind of machine learning improvements will Facebook make and what kind of content will the algorithm start flagging that it isn’t flagging today?
Is Facebook working with the FEC and other governments to come up with ad monitoring standards, or is it developing these standards on its own?
Facebook didn’t say, and a spokesperson declined to comment beyond the company’s formal announcement from Monday morning….
Adam Entous, Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin report that Russian Facebook ads showed a black woman firing a rifle, amid efforts to stoke racial strife:
One of the Russian-bought advertisements that Facebook shared with congressional investigators on Monday featured photographs of an armed black woman “dry firing” a rifle — pulling the trigger of the weapon without a bullet in the chamber, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Investigators believe the advertisement may have been designed to encourage African American militancy and, at the same time, to stoke fears within white communities, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the probe. But the precise purpose of the ad remains unclear to investigators, the people said.
The apparent tactic underscores how the Russians used U.S.-based technology platforms to target Americans with highly tailored and sometimes-contradictory messages to exploit divisions in American society over the past two years….
David Frum hears A Presidential Speech Steeped in Hypocrisy (“Trump would have done better to say a few things that sound real than a great many that sound false”):
….Trump’s speech to the nation after the Las Vegas atrocity, however, was steeped in hypocrisy. He is the least outwardly religious president of modern times, the president least steeped in scripture. For him to offer the consolations of God and faith after mass bloodletting is to invite derision. “It is love that defines us,” said President Trump, and if we weren’t heartbroken, we would laugh….
But whereas Vice President Pence could have pronounced those words with sincerity, or a convincing simulacrum thereof, Donald Trump looked shifty, nervous, and false. Speeches are watched as well as heard, and the viewer saw a president who wished he were somewhere else because he had been compelled to pretend something so radically false to his own nature….
What he can do is acknowledge his own nature and character, and speak as himself, in his own tones and accents, and without the religion in which he gives no evidence of believing and in which he is so poorly at home. “This is a terrible day. We are all saddened and outraged. We’ll learn more. If any criminals are still at large, we’ll hunt them down.” It’s better to say a few things that sound real than a great many that sound false….
(Frum is a secular Jew, and so easily discerns how unaccustomed to religious discussion Trump is, however different Trump & Frum are in every other respect; others of us are religious, and candidly, we can hear the same from an opposite perspective.)
Stef W. Knight offers Good news: 10 things humanity is getting right [listing three of her full list]:
Teen pregnancies are down by 51% from ten years ago, an extraordinarily fast social change compared to adult smoking, which took 40 years to reduce by half. Experts attribute the phenomenon to better use of birth control, as teenage girls were found to be just as likely to be sexually active in 2007 as 2012.
Oil independence: The U.S.’s dependence on foreign oil continues to decrease, with even fewer imports in 2016, a new 30 year low.
The hole in the earth’s ozone layer is on the mend with the help of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which helped phase out ozone-destroying chemicals.
Scientists have solved one of Pluto’s most puzzling mysteries: