MORNING BRIEFING: A new video of missing Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez is released as his family attempt to solve what happened to the 18-year-old, last seen in Byron Bay.

RT @VanityFair: Trumpworld's campaign to blame China for creating the coronavirus is ramping up—even as the U.S. intelligence community and WHO insist otherwise

(United States Federal Circuit) - Affirmed a finding of no liability in a trade secret misappropriation case where a jury found that a competitor did not steal Raytheon's trade secrets relating to the production of infrared cameras. Raytheon appealed but the Federal Circuit affirmed denial of the company's JMOL and new-trial motions, and also affirmed denial of the competitor's motion for attorney fees.

(United States Ninth Circuit) - Finding the crime described in Article 129 of South Korea’s Criminal Code fits squarely within the definition of “bribing a public official” from 18 U.S.C. Section 1956, the indictment was sufficient and there was no instructional error.

(United States Federal Circuit) - In a suit involving claims of patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets, arising from an award of a military contract to its competitor to provide infrared cameras, district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendants is reversed, as it was for the jury and not for the district court to determine when plaintiff should have first discovered the facts supporting its cause of action. Here, the district court erred by resolving genuine factual disputes in favor of the defendant, the moving party, in concluding that the statute of limitations barred plaintiff's claim.

(United States Federal Circuit) - Affirmed a finding of no liability in a trade secret misappropriation case where a jury found that a competitor did not steal Raytheon's trade secrets relating to the production of infrared cameras. Raytheon appealed but the Federal Circuit affirmed denial of the company's JMOL and new-trial motions, and also affirmed denial of the competitor's motion for attorney fees.

(United States Ninth Circuit) - Finding the crime described in Article 129 of South Korea’s Criminal Code fits squarely within the definition of “bribing a public official” from 18 U.S.C. Section 1956, the indictment was sufficient and there was no instructional error.

(United States First Circuit) - Affirmed summary judgment which had denied an employee's Title VII gender discrimination and retaliation claims. A field sales representative for a company in the medical field alleged she was denied a promotion based on her sex and that she was fired in retaliation for asserting her Title VII rights. However, the First Circuit concluded that she failed to present sufficient evidence of unlawful conduct to create a genuine factual dispute.

LONDON -- The CCTV footage from a Dutch business park shows a man in a black cap pouring the contents of a white container at the base of a cellular radio tower. Flames burst out as the man jogs back to his Toyota to flee into the evening.

Kirk Franklin performs "Love Theory" with guests.

Kirk Franklin performs "Love Theory" with guests.

Introducing two dark, minimalist free themes for writers and visual artists.

Well, this one hits the sweet spot of topics I keep trying to demonstrate: both a Streisand Effect and Masnick's Impossibility Theorem. As you may have heard, a group of Republican political consultants and strategists, who very much dislike Donald Trump, put together an effort called The Lincoln Project, which is a PAC to campaign against Trump and Trumpian politics. They recently released an anti-Trump campaign ad about his terrible handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, called Mourning in America, which is a reference to Ronald Reagan's famous Morning in America campaign ad for the 1984 Presidential election. The new ad is, well, pretty powerful:

And while it's unlikely to convince Trump fans deep into their delusions, it certainly got under the President's skin. He went on one of his famous late night Twitter temper tantrums about the ad, and later lashed out at the Lincoln Project when talking to reporters. He was super, super mad.

And what did that do? Well, first it got the ad a ton of views. Earlier this week, one of the Lincoln Project's founders, Rick Wilson, noted that the ad had already received 15 million views across various platforms in the day or so since the ad had been released. Also, it resulted in the Lincoln Project getting a giant boost in funding:

The Lincoln Project, which is run by Republican operatives who oppose President Donald Trump, raised $1 million after the president ripped the group on Twitter this week – marking it the super PAC’s biggest day of fundraising yet.

Reed Galen, a member of the Lincoln Project’s advisory committee, told CNBC that the total came after the president’s Tuesday morning Twitter tirade in reaction to an ad titled “Mourning in America,” which unloads on Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. It recently aired on Fox News, which Trump often watches and praises. Galen said it was the Lincoln Project’s best single-day fundraising haul

Not only that, but it has opened up more opportunity for the Lincoln Project team to get their word out. With so much interest in the ad, it opened up opportunities for the project members to get their message in various mainstream media sources. Reed Galen wrote a piece for NBC:

What we accomplished this week was not something to be celebrated. No commercial should have the power to derail the leader of the free world.

And another Lincoln Project founder, George Conway (who, of course, is the husband of Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway), wrote something similar for the Washington Post:

It may strike you as deranged that a sitting president facing a pandemic has busied himself attacking journalists, political opponents, television news hosts and late-night comedians — even deriding a former president who merely boasted that “the ‘Ratings’ of my News Conferences etc.” were driving “the Lamestream Media . . . CRAZY,” and floated bogus miracle cures, including suggesting that scientists consider injecting humans with household disinfectants such as Clorox.

If so, you’re not alone. Tens of thousands of mental-health professionals, testing the bounds of professional ethics, have warned for years about Trump’s unfitness for office.

Some people listened; many, including myself, did not, until it was too late.

That's the kind of media exposure you can't buy, but which you get when you have a President who appears wholly unfamiliar with the Streisand Effect.

And that then takes us to the Impossibility Theorem, regarding the impossibility of doing content moderation at scale well. After Trump's ongoing tirade, Facebook slapped a "Partly False" warning label on the video when posted on Facebook. While the whole situation is ridiculous, it's at least mildly amusing, considering how frequently clueless Trumpkins insist that Facebook censors "conservative" (by which they mean Trumpian) viewpoints. Also, somewhat ironic in all of this: the only reason that Facebook now places such fact check labels on things is because anti-Trump people yelled at how Facebook needed to do more fact checking of political content on its site. So, now you get this.

Part of the issue is that Politifact judged one line in the ad as "false." That line was that Trump "bailed out Wall St. but not Main St." Politifact says that since the CARES Act Paycheck Protection Program has given potentially forgivable loans to some small businesses, and because the bill was done by Congress, not the President, that line is "false." And yet, because angry (usually anti-Trump) people demanded that Facebook do more useless fact checking, the end result is that the video now gets a "false" label.

Of course, this shows both the impossibility of doing content moderation well and the silliness of betting big on fact checking with a full "true or false" claim. One could argue that that line has misleading elements, but is true in most cases. Tons of small businesses are shuttering. Many businesses have been unable to get PPP loans, and under the current terms of the loans, they're useless for many (especially if they have no work for people to do, since the loans have to be mostly used on payroll over the next couple months). But does that make the entire ad "false"? Of course not.

And Rick Wilson is super mad about this. He's right to be mad about Politifact's designation, though it's really a condemnation of the religious focus on "true or false" in fact checking, rather than in focusing on what is misleading or not:

But the ad doesn’t actually claim that small businesses received zero help. Rather, it makes the point that Main Street America is still seriously struggling as the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic continues.

But Wilson is also mad at Facebook:

Speaking exclusively to Mediaite, Wilson called the decision “the typical fuckery we’ve come to expect from both the Trump camp and their tame Facebook allies.”

“Facebook is perfectly content to allow content from QAnon lunatics, anti-vaxxers, alt-righters, and every form of Trump/Russian — but I repeat myself — disinformation,” he pointed out. “This is a sign of just how powerfully ‘Mourning In America’ shook Donald Trump and his allies. Their attempt to censor our ad isn’t a setback for us; it’s a declaration of an information war we will win.”

Separately, the Lincoln Project also sent out an email to supporters, again blaming Facebook:

... it's no secret that Facebook has stood by and done little to nothing as lie after lie — from the Liar-In-Chief himself — runs wild on their platform.

(Oh, and let's also not forget the conspiracy theories, foreign disinformation campaigns and negligence that got Mark Zuckerberg questioned by the United States Congress.)

But, this? This is an entirely different and dangerous kind of collusion.

And what is Facebook's excuse for playing favorites with its recently-transferred former employees in the Trump campaign?

They say a "fact-checker" labeled our claim that "Donald Trump helped bailout Wall Street, not Main Street" was untrue.

....Really?

The email goes on to justify the "main street" line with a bunch of links, and then again argues that Facebook is "censoring the truth" to help Trump:

Is that "Partly False?" Of course not.

We told the truth about Donald Trump...

He lost his damn mind over it on Twitter...

Attacked us in front of Air Force One...

Then sent his spin machine to discredit us...

And now his allies at Facebook are doing his damage control by censoring the truth he doesn't like.

I get the frustration -- and I find it at least a bit ironic that the whole "fact checking" system was a response to anti-Trump folks mad at Facebook for allowing pro-Trump nonsense to spread -- but this is just another example of the Impossibility Theorem. There is no "good" solution here. We live in a time where everyone's trying to discredit everyone they disagree with, and many of these things depend on your perspective or your interpretation of a broad statement, like whether or not Trump is helping "main street."

We can agree that it's silly that Facebook has put this label on the video, but also recognize that it's not "Trump's allies at Facebook" working to "censor the truth he doesn't like." That's just absurd (especially given the reason the fact checking set up was put together in the first place).

But, hey, outrage and claims of censorship feed into the narrative (and feed into the Streisand Effect), so perhaps it all is just designed to work together.

Where did COVID-19 come from? And is the Wuhan Institute of Virology to blame?

This set of notes focuses on the restriction problem in Fourier analysis. Introduced by Elias Stein in the 1970s, the restriction problem is a key model problem for understanding more general oscillatory integral operators, and which has turned out to be connected to many questions in geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis, combinatorics, number theory, and […]

The square root cancellation heuristic, briefly mentioned in the preceding set of notes, predicts that if a collection of complex numbers have phases that are sufficiently “independent” of each other, then similarly, if are a collection of functions in a Lebesgue space that oscillate “independently” of each other, then we expect We have already seen […]

Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory

2018 by Brendan Fong and David I. Spivak

Category theory is becoming a central hub for all of pure mathematics. It is unmatched in its ability to organize and layer abstractions, to find commonalities between structures of all sorts, and to facilitate communication between different mathematical communities. But it has also been branching out into science, informatics, and industry. We believe that it has the potential to be a major cohesive force in the world, building rigorous bridges between disparate worlds, both theoretical and practical. The motto at MIT is mens et manus, Latin for mind and hand. We believe that category theory—and pure math in general—has stayed in the realm of mind for too long; it is ripe to be brought to hand.

An enjoyable 25-minute introductory talk: YOW! Lambda Jam 2019 - Ken Scambler - Applied Category Theory (slides)

What do programming, quantum physics, chemistry, neuroscience, systems biology, natural language parsing, causality, network theory, game theory, dynamical systems and database theory have in common?

As functional programmers, we know how useful category theory can be for our work - or perhaps how abstruse and distant it can seem. What is less well known is that applying category theory to the real world is an exciting field of study that has really taken off in just the last few years. It turns out that we share something big with other fields and industries - we want to make big things out of little things without everything going to hell! The key is compositionality, the central idea of category theory.

Previously: Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory.

(via Brian McKenna)

Let's talk about Blockchain. Goal is to use this forum topic to highlight its usefulness to programming language theory and practice. If you're familiar with existing research efforts, please share them here. In addition, feel free to generate ideas for how Blockchain could improve languages and developer productivity.

As one tasty example: Blockchain helps to formalize thinking about mutual knowledge and common knowledge, and potentially think about sharing intergalactic computing power through vast distributed computing fabrics. If we can design contracts in such a way that maximizes the usage of mutual knowledge while minimizing common knowledge to situations where you have to "prove your collateral", third-party transactions could eliminate a lot of back office burden. But, there might be benefits in other areas of computer science from such research, as well.

Some language researchers, like Mark S. Miller, have always dreamed of Agoric and the Decades-Long Quest for Secure Smart Contracts.

Some may also be aware that verification of smart contracts is an important research area, because of the notorious theft of purse via logic bug in an Ethereum smart contract.

Just in case you missed it because you were too busy perusing tremendous Trump memes, Donald Trump has a profound fear/hatred of sharks. Naturally, the internet was ready to step up and offer moral support, or just, you know, troll the sh*t out of him. 

While Trump Memes have been online for a while by now, the internet has come up with a brand new meme in light of footage of Donald Trump craning his neck over the voting booths to check his wife Melania's ballot. Possibly because everyone has a lot of time on their hands while they wait in insanely long voting lines.

It's round two for PotterCast and Fantastic Beasts! The show picks up where it left off and dives back in with your submitted questions and theories to guide them.

Episode 264 — Fantastic Theories

PotterCast is hosted by Melissa Anelli, John Noe, Frank Franco, and Zack Luye.

Find the latest episode and explore PotterCast interviews, discussions and more at PotterCast.com

Visit the-leaky-cauldron.org for the latest and greatest from Harry Potter's Wizarding World.

I am going to explain what, in my opinion, is the correct social marketing theory. Not just that, I am also going to explain 2 ways to make good use of it in your business.

We model optimal e-cigarette regulation and estimate key sufficient statistics. Using tax changes and scanner data, we estimate relatively elastic demand and limited substitution between e-cigarettes and combustible cigarettes. In sample surveys, historical smoking declines for high- and low-vaping demographics were unchanged after e-cigarettes were introduced; this demographic shift-share identification also suggests limited substitution. We field a new survey of experts, who report that vaping is almost as harmful as smoking cigarettes. In our model, these results imply that current e-cigarette taxes are far below the social optimum, but Monte Carlo simulations highlight substantial uncertainty.

The secret car lairs of L.A. are under the radar and plentiful. Check out one of the latest: a state-of-the-art garage near LAX that is part Pantheon, part Batcave. Cigars? They have that too.

Theodore Payne offers 30-plus virtual tours of native plant landscapes.

Novak Djokovic has been involved in controversial talks with a friend on Instagram.

GAME OF THRONES saw Jaime and Cersei Lannister perish together, but what if George RR Martin's A Dream of Spring will see a different ending?

THE WINDS OF WINTER will have a big focus on the Stark children's POV, argues a new fan theory.

State media says US claims that the coronavirus originated in a research laboratory are "absurd".

BBC News examines allegations that the coronavirus was accidentally released from a lab.

The following article, Photos Of Kim Jong Un Spark Conspiracy Theories About A Body Double…You Be The Judge, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

For several weeks rumors of the North Korean dictator’s sickness and ultimately, his death, have been making their rounds in the media. North Korea’s state-run media released photos of  Kim Jong Un that were allegedly taken on May 1, at the opening of a fertilizer factory in Sunchon, N. Korea. Twitter users who’ve studied the images are […]

Continue reading: Photos Of Kim Jong Un Spark Conspiracy Theories About A Body Double…You Be The Judge ...

4 March 2020 , Volume 96, Number 2

7 May 2020 , Volume 96, Number 3

Yifei Zhu
Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 373 (2020), 3733-3764.
Abstract, references and article information

M. M. Kapustei and P. V. Slyusarchuk
Theor. Probability and Math. Statist. 99 (2020), 101-111.
Abstract, references and article information

Gregory J. Galloway and Hyun Chul Jang
Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 148 (2020), 2617-2629.
Abstract, references and article information

Qingying Bu
Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 148 (2020), 2459-2467.
Abstract, references and article information

Marcelo Fiore and Vladimir Voevodsky
Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 148 (2020), 2297-2315.
Abstract, references and article information