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6. View Full coverage on Google News

Adan Abdullahi knows that visiting the mosque for evening prayers is forbidden. There is a curfew in place in the Somali capital, and authorities have pleaded with worshippers to stay home as coronavirus infections rise.

Ivory Coast on Friday lifted many of its coronavirus containment measures, except in economic capital Abidjan which has the vast majority of the country's cases, as jubilant locals feted the return of the country's vibrant nightlife.

The University of California announced that an artificial intelligent system has solved the puzzle in just over a second, besting the human world record by more than two seconds.

• Facebook is taking a harder line on misinformation related to coronavirus than it has on other health topics in the past.
• This decision may increase the pressure on the company to act more decisively against other forms of harmful falsehoods that spread on its social networks.
• Facebook is banning events that promote flouting lockdown protests, and is removing the conspiracy theory video "Plandemic."
• But false claims that vaccines are dangerous still proliferate on Facebook — even though they contribute to the deaths of children.

Amid the pandemic, Facebook is taking a harder line on misinformation than it has in the past. That decision may come back to haunt it.

As coronavirus has wreaked havoc across the globe, forcing lockdowns and disrupting economies, false information and hoaxes have spread like wildfire on social media. Miracle cures, intentional disinformation about government policies, and wild claims that Bill Gates orchestrated the entire health crisis abound.

In the past, Facebook has been heavily criticised for failing to take action to stop its platform being used to facilitate the spread of misinformation. To be sure, coronavirus falsehoods are still easily found on Facebook — but the company has taken more decisive action than in previous years:

• For starters, Facebook is now displaying warning messages to people who have shared false information about COVID-19. They're imperfect — Stat reported that they may be too vague in their wording to have a major impact — but it's a step further than Facebook has taken on misinformation in the past.
• The company is also taking down event pages for events that reject mainstream science on coronavirus by calling on people to flout lockdown rules.
• And it is banning "Plandemic," a conspiratorial video about coronavirus that has been going viral on social media and contains numerous falsehoods.

But Facebook's actions to combat COVID-19 misinformation may backfire — in the sense that it has the potential to dramatically increase pressure on the company to take stronger action against other forms of misinformation.

The company has long struggled with how to handle fake news and hoaxes; historically, its approach is not to delete them, but to try to artificially stifle their reach via algorithmic tweaks. Despite this, pseudoscience, anti-government conspiracy theories, and other falsehoods still abound on the social network.

Facebook has now demonstrated that it is willing to take more decisive action on misinformation, when the stakes are high enough. Its critics may subsequently ask why it is so reticent to combat the issue when it causes harm in other areas — particularly around other medical misinformation.

One expected defence for Facebook? That it is focused on taking down content that causes "imminent harm," and while COVID-19 misinformation falls into that category, lots of other sorts of falsehoods don't.

However, using "imminence" as the barometer of acceptability is dubious: Vaccine denialism directly results in the deaths of babies and children. That this harm isn't "imminent" doesn't make it any less dangerous — but, for now, such material is freely posted on Facebook.

Far-right conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, and more recent, Qanon, have also spread on Facebook — stoking baseless fears of shadowy cabals secretly controlling the government. These theories don't intrinsically incite harm, but have been linked to multiple acts of violence, from a Pizzagate believer firing his weapon in a pizza parlour to the Qanon-linked killing of a Gambino crime boss. (Earlier this week, Facebook did take down some popular QAnon pages — but for breaking its rules on fake profiles, rather than disinformation.)

And Facebook is still full of groups rallying against 5G technology, making evidence-free claims about its health effects (and now, sometimes linking it to coronavirus in a messy web). These posts exist on a continuum, with believers at the extreme end attempting to burn down radio towers and assault technicians; Facebook does take down such incitements to violence, but the more general fearmongering that can act as a gateway to more extreme action remains.

This week, Facebook announced the first 20 members of its Oversight Board — a "Supreme Court"-style entity that will review reports from users make rulings as to what objectionable content is and isn't allowed on Facebook and Instagram, with — in theory — the power to overrule the company. It remains to be seen whether its decisions may affect the company's approach for misinformation, and it still needs to appoint the rest of its members and get up and running.

For now, limits remain in place as to what Facebook will countenance in its fight against coronavirus-specific misinformation.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would immediately take down posts advertising dangerous false cures to COVID-19, like drinking bleach. It is "obviously going to create imminent harm," he said in March. "That is just in a completely different class of content than the back-and-forth accusations a candidate might make in an election."

But in April, President Donald Trump suggested that people might try injecting a "disinfectant" as a cure, which both has the potential to be extremely harmful, and will not cure coronavirus.

Facebook is not taking down video of his comments.

Do you work at Facebook? Contact Business Insider reporter Rob Price via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 650-636-6268), encrypted email (robaeprice@protonmail.com), standard email (rprice@businessinsider.com), Telegram/Wickr/WeChat (robaeprice), or Twitter DM (@robaeprice). We can keep sources anonymous. Use a non-work device to reach out. PR pitches by standard email only, please.

SEE ALSO: Facebook announced the first 20 members of its oversight board that will decide what controversial content is allowed on Facebook and Instagram

Join the conversation about this story »

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He did it in the Ukraine affair, of course, but most of his abuses have happened closer to home.

Blast from the Past: This blog entry was first issued on June 30, 2014 and was reissued on March 28, 2020. As I re-introduce this piece, we are sheltering in place as is so much of the world. That means schools are closed in many places and teachers and parents are concerned about what is being lost from children's education. As with many of you, I've been trying to help protect children's learning during these fraught times. Which brings us to today's blog entry, this one about how I taught my own children to read at home.

Last week, I began a multi-part series on how I taught my daughters to read. My oldest daughter wryly replied to that entry, suggesting I could have saved a lot of pixels if I had just said that I hired a tutor…. And her son who just had his third birthday (and who did not read that entry) informed me that his goal for being three years old was to read words.

So far, I have explained the literacy environment, print awareness, and sight word teaching that were part of teaching my daughters to read, but phonics also played an important role.

Previously, I described how I taught my daughters about print, sight vocabulary, phonological awareness,

This month’s school closures have forced families to become teachers at home overnight. 

Teaching students to read is the first job of our schools. How can we help all students become strong, confident readers? Literacy for All: Equitable Practices for Reading and Dyslexia was held on February 20, 2020 in Annapolis, Maryland. The event was hosted by National Center on Improving Literacy (NCIL), Decoding Dyslexia Maryland (DD-MD), and community partners. Reading experts from NCIL shared best practices in early screening and interventions supported by decades of reading research.

oscon: Tutorials at #OSCON are filing up (some already sold out). Register soon to get your top choices http://t.co/bQv7k8VXTf

strataconf: Read our initial findings of @amplab's open source benchmark for tracking large-scale Query Engines http://t.co/rGgOVeTHQ8 #strataconf

strataconf: Can data rescue the forest elephant? Yes, with your help. http://t.co/DZBXKRdUcA Read about Elephant Listening Project & send us your ideas

Interesting question. Before I answer, let me ask one: What keeps Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, up at night? You know Amazon, the trillion-dollar corporation that delivers something like a 5 billion packages a year. I’m at a professional meeting. The chair asks what “levers” we have for improving reading achievement in the U.S. It’s an easy question. There are so many possibilities. The first one most folks think of is, the teacher. If teachers did better, kids would do better.

Confession I always had students who entered my fourth grade class reading significantly below grade level. And each year, when I passed them on to fifth grade, those students were still behind. I did everything I knew how to do — I taught Guided Reading lessons, provided independent reading time, found them books to love, replied to readers’ response journals- but no matter what I tried in my Balanced Literacy classroom, the achievement gap persisted.

Teacher question: Everyone says reading and writing are connected. But our school focuses on only reading. We have a reading program (we don’t have a writing program). We test the students three times a year in reading, but never in writing. Writing isn’t even on our report card, though I guess it is part of Language Arts. What should we be doing with writing? Shanahan's response: You came to the right place. I think your school is making a big mistake not giving sufficient attention to writing.

Teaching students to read is the first job of our schools. How can we help all students become strong, confident readers? Literacy for All: Equitable Practices for Reading and Dyslexia was held on February 20, 2020 in Annapolis, Maryland. The event was hosted by National Center on Improving Literacy (NCIL), Decoding Dyslexia Maryland (DD-MD), and community partners. Reading experts from NCIL shared best practices in early screening and interventions supported by decades of reading research.

Teacher’s question: Our school psychologist tests all of our boy and girls for RAN. He says it is the best predictor of reading ability. How can I improve my students’ RAN performance? Shanahan’s response: If someone tells you that you can teach RAN, run!

WhatsApp on Tuesday placed new limits on message forwarding as part of an effort to curb the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic.

Interesting question. Before I answer, let me ask one: What keeps Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, up at night? You know Amazon, the trillion-dollar corporation that delivers something like a 5 billion packages a year. I’m at a professional meeting. The chair asks what “levers” we have for improving reading achievement in the U.S. It’s an easy question. There are so many possibilities. The first one most folks think of is, the teacher. If teachers did better, kids would do better.

Confession I always had students who entered my fourth grade class reading significantly below grade level. And each year, when I passed them on to fifth grade, those students were still behind. I did everything I knew how to do — I taught Guided Reading lessons, provided independent reading time, found them books to love, replied to readers’ response journals- but no matter what I tried in my Balanced Literacy classroom, the achievement gap persisted.

Teacher question: Everyone says reading and writing are connected. But our school focuses on only reading. We have a reading program (we don’t have a writing program). We test the students three times a year in reading, but never in writing. Writing isn’t even on our report card, though I guess it is part of Language Arts. What should we be doing with writing? Shanahan's response: You came to the right place. I think your school is making a big mistake not giving sufficient attention to writing.

Teaching students to read is the first job of our schools. How can we help all students become strong, confident readers? Literacy for All: Equitable Practices for Reading and Dyslexia was held on February 20, 2020 in Annapolis, Maryland. The event was hosted by National Center on Improving Literacy (NCIL), Decoding Dyslexia Maryland (DD-MD), and community partners. Reading experts from NCIL shared best practices in early screening and interventions supported by decades of reading research.

Teacher’s question: Our school psychologist tests all of our boy and girls for RAN. He says it is the best predictor of reading ability. How can I improve my students’ RAN performance? Shanahan’s response: If someone tells you that you can teach RAN, run!

We live in an increasingly connected world. It’s estimated that there will be about 260 million internet-connected devices in the U.S. by 2020, and the next wave of these devices will push our data demand even further. New Bluetooth advancements, for instance, enable devices to perform within a range that’s four times greater, twice the speed, and eight times the […]

The post The Automation Boom is Coming. Will the Internet Be Ready? appeared first on ReadWrite.

Thought banana bread couldn't get any better? Try this riff on our original banana bread recipe by adding cream cheese in big, bold swirls.

Continue reading "Cream Cheese Banana Bread" »

This morning I took (early) delivery of Amazon’s new Kindle 3 – I opted for the WiFi only version – a device that claims 50% better contrast than any other e-reader, a 21% smaller body while keeping the same 6″ size reading area, and a 20% increase in the speed of page turns. These are, [...]

Over at TechCrunch I’ve penned an op/ed piece on why I’m in love with the Kindle. Or more specifically, why the dedicated e-Reader still has a role to play in the context of Apple’s iPad and competing multifunctional tablet computers, such as the plethora of Android-powered devices that are about to hit the market. I’m [...]

velocityconf: @tsantero @garethr No, there's just a lot that goes into producing #velocityconf. Plus the chairs are getting ready for Santa Clara + NY! :)

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Conservatives had this Common Core thing all wrong, it was said. We’d be proven wrong by history. Common Core, pushed by President Barack Obama, was going to work. It wasn’t like all the other liberal education plans. A new study by the Pioneer Institute reveals that, no, we were right all along. The study, released…

The post New Study Confirms We Were Right: Reading, Math Scores Have Collapsed Thanks to Obama, Common Core appeared first on The Western Journal.

In just under five months, both President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden will, one assumes, step onto a debate stage at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. It’s one heck of an assumption, and for more reasons than one. We don’t know if there are going to be debates…

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When jokes are so horrible, so obvious, so corny that they make your eyes roll, it’s a good chance that they’re what many call “dad jokes.” Bordering on lame, and all the more hilarious because of it, these jokes are so bad and yet fathers seem to get such joy from trotting out the perfect…

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If you’re a big business and you abused the Small Business Association’s new Paycheck Protection Program, you’re getting very close to the deadline for you to pay the government back. If you don’t, that means the government is going to be coming after you — and you can definitely be ready for an audit. That’s…

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Rita J. King, co-director and EVP for business development at Science House, recently conducted a series of interviews with business leaders, exploring the challenges and hurdles companies face in evolving business landscapes. In this interview, King chats with Jen Bruno, SVP of culture and human capital at LPL Financial, about mobilizing a change-ready workforce, leadership […]

Part of the Antarctic diary promo for the BBC UK Homepage

Introducing Instapaper 4.0 for iPad and iPhone

The lede here is that my pal, Marco, has just released the stellar new 4.0 version of his Instapaper suite.

This is fantastic news, and–as if you needed one more of Marco’s beta testers to say so–I do sincerely hope you’ll mark the occasion (and support his hard work) by purchasing the Instapaper iOS app(s). I promise you’ll be treating yourself to a massive update to an already excellent product.

Now, it’s fortunate and appropriate that you’ll be hearing this advice at length from a lot of people this week. Because, if it’s not already obvious, Marco’s little app (and its associated services) enjoys a rabid fanbase of sundry paragraph cultists who are as eager as I am to spread the word; and, yes, we do want you to join the Reading Nerd cult.

But, I also want to mark the occasion by adding a few thoughts on exactly what Instapaper has done, and continues to do, for me. (As you may already know, I’m a big Marco fan.)

Thing is, I want to tell you how Marco has made a magical machine for people who have decided to read.

Long-Time Fan

For years, Instapaper has been one of the best made, most used, and most beloved apps in my iOS ecosystem. It’s always lived on my iPhone’s home page, and, as you can surmise, that’s because I use Instapaper a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Specifically, I use Instapaper a lot because it helps me do four things extremely well. Four things that work together to make my life a little better.

In that typically annoying mixed order I can’t seem to stop doing, here goes.

2. Deciding WHEN to read

Second, and most obviously, I use Instapaper maybe five to ten times a day to catch up on my reading. Which is great. This is what Instapaper is actually for, right? You read stuff.

Long articles, smaller features, short books, big piles of documentation, and really just anything that I would like to read…later. More saliently, these are things that I have decided to read. This decision part’s important, but more on that in a couple minutes.

But, how does all this “stuff” I’ve decided to read get in to Instapaper?

1. Deciding WHAT to read

See, this is the really important first part. Because as much as I use Instapaper for all manner of reading, its use as an ephemeral destination for mostly ephemeral content wouldn’t be nearly so useful if I didn’t have so many ways to collect all that stuff. So, that flexibility in collecting material is where I end up using some form of Instapaper dozens of times each day.

Examples?

I have a bookmarklet for adding items to Instapaper in 4 browsers on 7 devices. I have (and use the hell out of) the “Send to Instapaper” services that are built in to everything from Google Reader to Reeder to Flipboard to Instacast to Tweetbot to Zite to you name it. I can automate in or out of Instapaper with If This Then That, I can email items directly to Instapaper–hell, I can even just copy a URL from iOS Safari, and paste it directly into the motherscratching Instapaper app.

Suffice it to say, there are many ways to get “stuff” into Instapaper. E.g.:

But, that banner dump only tells part of the story.

Yes, a big part of this is about ubiquity and ease-of-use. But, the practical result is that all those little entrees to Instapaper are available to me everywhere I might need them, and they each represent a single little click that silently adds an item of “stuff” to my Instapaper pile.

Each button is one more simple opportunity for me to decide to read.

3. Deciding WHERE to read

Now, the third part of this magic is less immediately obvious, not least because the reading experience of the Instapaper iOS apps is, for my own purposes, perfect. But, there’s more.

Because, all that support for getting stuff into Instapaper is mirrored by an endless number of ways to get stuff back out. To, in fact, read. That thing I decided to read is now everywhere.

However I ended up deciding to read something, seconds after that *click*, the real magic starts happening, and–through whatever inscrutable black art and transmogrification is happening inside the fearsome celestial engine Marco has made–that decision to read is expressed in the most elegant of results and in a startlingly broad variety of convenient places.

It’s readable on a website; it’s readable on an iPhone, and 2 iPads; it’s readable on a Kindle 3; it’s readable on the crazy number of apps and services that display Instapaper items. And, it’s even preserved for posterity in my private Pinboard archive.

So, for practical purposes, this stuff that I’ve decided to read can now go whooshing through a network of customized tubes, and gently land practically anywhere that well-formed bits may reside.

4. Just…Deciding to Read

I know most of you know these things. I know you’re familiar with the many “Features and Benefits” of Instapaper. And, I even know that most of you reading this are probably already using Instapaper–perhaps even to read this very article.

So, the point here is not simply that Instapaper is flexible, idiot-proof, and sanity-savingly redundant. Although it is all those things and many more.

The point is that my life always gets better when I decide to read things–and then actually read those things I decided to read. This is not a trivial point.

We’re all busy, and we’re all bombarded with 10,000 potential calls on our attention every day. Some days, we handle that better than others. Some days, we don’t handle it all.

All I know, is that, throughout my life, deciding to read has made that life better.

It made my life better at 7 with Henry Huggins. It made my life better at 16 with Slaughterhouse-Five. It made my life better at 20 with Absalom, Absalom!. And, it made my life way better at 25 with A Confederacy of Dunces (cf.).

And, now, for the past few years–following over a decade during which I read way more href tags than actual prose paragraphs–my life has gotten better, in part, due to Instapaper. I’ve finally gotten my hands around this “too much stuff” issue, at least insofar as it relates to words of theoretical interest. Now, I know where it goes. It goes into Instapaper.

Because, now? Yeah. Twenty-some years after a college career sucking down over 1,000 pages a week, I am finally returning to reading a lot more. Because, I am deciding to read a lot more. Instapaper means there’s no excuse for not reading a lot more. Period.

How about you?

What Are YOU Deciding?

When you’re in line at the ATM or the professional sporting event, what do you do?

If you’re like a lot of people, you hit your mobile device like a pigeon on a goddamned pellet. Then, you decide what happens.

You can decide to throw birds at pigs. You can decide to check in on which strangers are pretending to like you today. You may even decide to see what you would look like if you were really fat.

Thing is, you could also decide to read. Just for a couple minutes. Maybe more. Maybe less. Who knows. It’s your decision.

A Nudge Towards “Better”

But, if you have followed the circuitous skeins of yarn comprising this little sweater you’ve been reading, it comes down to this:

If you’ve decided that you want to read, Marco’s app will really help you. He’s removed any phony barriers you’ve built about “not having time” or “not having it with you” or “not knowing where to put it.” There are no excuses, apart from the superficial animated ones you’ve constructed out of cartoon birds.

As for me? In the last week alone, I decided to read a lot of things in Instapaper. A small sampling:

I decided to read about an American family’s educational experiment in Russia.

I decided to read about what Heidegger means by Being-in-the-World.

I decided to read about why toasters are so bad.

I decided to read about responsive web design.

I decided to read about why Charlie Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich.

I decided to read about how Open Data could make San Francisco Public Transportation better.

I decided to read about how John Siracusa remembers Steve Jobs.

I decided, and then I read. I read, and I read.

So, thanks, Marco. You’ve made my life better by making it easier to decide to read. Then, you made it way easier to do the actual reading.

And, to you–the kind readers-of-prose-paragraphs who were inexplicably patient enough to decide to read this long article–please consider supporting Marco’s work.

Please get an account at Instapaper and, if you have an iOS dingus, please do buy the Instapaper app.

In addition to having exquisite taste in app icons and a lovely speaking voice, Marco’s just a very good human. And, good humans more than deserve our support.

Buy Instapaper 4.0 by Marco Arment.

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