Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 6:35 AM and sunset 7:03 PM, for 12h 27m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 24.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred tenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1940, Britain successfully defeated Germany’s largest raid during the months-long Battle of Britain, successfully turning the tide of the greater battle in Britain’s favor:
On Sunday, 15 September 1940, the Luftwaffe launched its largest and most concentrated attack against London in the hope of drawing out the RAF into a battle of annihilation. Around 1,500 aircraft took part in the air battles which lasted until dusk.[4] The action was the climax of the Battle of Britain.[18]
RAF Fighter Command defeated the German raids. The Luftwaffe formations were dispersed by a large cloud base and failed to inflict severe damage on the city of London. In the aftermath of the raid, Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion. Having been defeated in daylight, the Luftwaffe turned its attention to The Blitz night campaign which lasted until May 1941.[17]
On this day in 1862, the 23rd Infantry Heads south:
The 23rd Wisconsin Infantry left Madison for Cincinnati, Ohio under the command of Colonel Joshua Guppey. It would go on to fight in the battles of Port Gibson, Champion Hill, the Siege of Vicksburg, the Red River Campaign, Spanish Fort, and Fort Blakely in Alabama. The regiment concluded the war by occupying Mobile, Alabama, where it mustered out of service on July 4, 1865. It lost 308 men during service.
Recommended for reading in full —
Julia Angwin, Madeleine Varner and Ariana Tobin report that Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters’ (“After being contacted by ProPublica, Facebook removed several anti-Semitic ad categories and promised to improve monitoring”):
Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you.
Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’”
To test if these ad categories were real, we paid $30 to target those groups with three “promoted posts” — in which a ProPublica article or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook approved all three ads within 15 minutes….
Will Oremus and Bill Carey report that Facebook’s Offensive Ad Targeting Options Go Far Beyond “Jew Haters”:
….Contacted about the anti-Semitic ad categories by ProPublica, Facebook removed them, explaining that they had been generated algorithmically. The company added that it would explore ways to prevent similarly offensive ad targeting categories from appearing in the future.
Yet when Slate tried something similar Thursday, our ad targeting “Kill Muslimic Radicals,” “Ku-Klux-Klan,” and more than a dozen other plainly hateful groups was similarly approved. In our case, it took Facebook’s system just one minute to give the green light.
This isn’t the first time the investigative journalism nonprofit has exposed shady targeting options on Facebook’s ad network. Last year, ProPublica found that Facebook allowed it to exclude certain “ethnic affinities” from a housing ad—a practice that appeared to violate federal anti-discrimination laws. Facebook responded by tweaking its system to prevent ethnic targeting in ads for credit, housing, or jobs. And last week, the Washington Post reported that Facebook had run ads from shadowy, Kremlin-linked Russian groups that were apparently intended to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election….
Robinson Meyer asks Could Facebook Have Caught Its ‘Jew Hater’ Ad Targeting? (“Facebook can monitor the things it does that make it money.”):
….Last October, another ProPublica investigation revealed that Facebook allowed landlords and other housing providers to omit certain races when selling advertising, a practice that violates the Fair Housing Act.
To Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law at Harvard University, that story suggests the entire way that tech companies currently sell ads online might need an overhaul. “For categories with tiny audiences, with titles drawn from data that Facebook users themselves enter—such as education and interests—it may amount to a tree falling in a forest that no one hears,” he said. “But should anything more than negligible ad traffic begin with categories, there’s a responsibility to see what the platform is supporting”….
A twenty-mile ride turned out well for a coyote: