Facebook said it will expand its fact-checking program to Instagram. But the system is already overwhelmed, and may not be able to handle more information.
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Friday, August 16, 2019
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Marlon Ways says social media to blame for today’s culture of “canceling” comedians
Comedians who make “questionable statements” run the risk of being “canceled” which has now become somewhat embedded into today’s culture and that’s something Marlon Wayans frowns upon.
—Marlon Wayans wishes daughter ‘Happy Pride’ and claps back at trolls for hateful comments—
The comedian opened up to Buzzfeed about how today’s “cancel culture” has made it challenging to be funny and the delicate dance it takes between keeping it real and authentic without offending folks.
“My job is to talk about all the things people are scared to say,” Wayans said. “My job is to go into these dark topics and go in these dark caves and come out with this elixir called ‘the laugh.’”
But being honest has hurt some comedians’ careers and he says social media has a lot to do with it.
“Social media alerts the media, which then tells the message that everybody should be as sensitive about every topic, but that’s not true,” he explained. “Comedians, we’re supposed to speak our voice and we’re supposed to find what’s funny. That’s my job. It’s like telling a fireman, ‘You can’t go into that burning building.’ Well, how am I gonna save lives?”
Some of his famous peers like Kevin Hart have dealt with backlash for telling offensive jokes. Hart, for instance, got caught in a whirlwind of criticism after decade-old homophobic tweets resurfaced and caused him to step down from hosting this year’s Academy Awards.
Recently comedian Chris Rock outraged folks with a social media post that took aim at white mass shooters. Some argued that it was racially insensitive to assume mass shooters are likely to be white men.
Wayans doesn’t subscribe to saying sorry for a joke and says he “personally doesn’t believe in apologizing.”
“You know, freedom of speech,” he said. “What happened to that?”
—R. Kelly was a ‘no show’ at pretrial hearing in Chicago—
He said a comedian’s style shouldn’t result in his career going up in smoke for testing out material.
“I’m just up there exploring the joke,” he said about testing out material at comedy clubs. “It takes about a year to two years to get that joke good enough to where you’re gonna wanna say it out loud in a special. We say dumb shit in order to say smart shit,” he said. “But it takes time, and so the audience has to give us that time to work on the material before we present it to you in a special. And then you can judge.”
The post Marlon Ways says social media to blame for today’s culture of “canceling” comedians appeared first on theGrio.
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R. Kelly was a ‘no show’ at pretrial hearing in Chicago
R. Kelly may have thrown in the towel because he reportedly refused to show up in court for a pretrial hearing on Thursday.
“The defendant was to be brought to court today. That was all worked out. The sheriffs were going to be bringing him over,” explained Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Jennifer Gonzalez said.
—R. Kelly sits in solitary while allegations eat away at him, lawyer says—
“As I understand it, he refused transport and so that is why the defendant is not before your honor today,” Gonzales said, according to NBC News.
Kelly is in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago awaiting trial on a number of sexual abuse crimes, and the hearing was a routine part of the evidentiary process. The hearing before Cook County Judge Lawrence Flood still was held.
Kelly’s attorney, however, said the claim that he refused transport is “not 100-percent true” but wouldn’t elaborate.
“I don’t want to discuss matters that I discussed with the U.S. Marshals Service in open court,” Greenberg said. “Suffice it to say, the Marshal Service says that moving Mr. Kelly is a large undertaking.”
As previously reported, the embattled R&B singer is having quite a tough time behind bars, as he waits in federal custody to face charges behind multiple allegations of sexual misconduct with minors, according to his attorney.
—R. Kelly charged with criminal sexual abuse; no-bond warrant set by judge—
Steve Greenberg said his client is downright miserable and frequently gets emotional, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
“He’s dealing with a lot of stories that have been made up. He’s not a fighter. I’ve seen him cry when he talks about the situation,” Greenberg told the Sun-Times.
However, Greenberg said Kelly is determined to “fight for the truth” to get out.
Kelly is charged with child sex crimes in multiple states and is currently being held behind bars in Chicago.
Kelly’s next court day is Sept. 17, and the Judge let both sides know that an R. Kelly absence better not happen.
“We’ll have Mr. Kelly here then,” he said.
The post R. Kelly was a ‘no show’ at pretrial hearing in Chicago appeared first on theGrio.
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Data-mining for dark matter
When Tracy Slatyer faced a crisis of confidence early in her educational career, Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and a certain fictional janitor at MIT helped to bolster her resolve.
Slatyer was 11 when her family moved from Canberra, Australia, to the island nation of Fiji. It was a three-year stay, as part of her father’s work for the South Pacific Forum, an intergovernmental organization.
“Fiji was quite a way behind the U.S. and Australia in terms of gender equality, and for a girl to be interested in math and science carried noticeable social stigma,” Slatyer recalls. “I got bullied quite a lot.”
She eventually sought guidance from the school counselor, who placed the blame for the bullying on the victim herself, saying that Slatyer wasn’t sufficiently “feminine.” Slatyer countered that the bullying seemed to be motivated by the fact that she was interested in and good at math, and she recalls the counselor’s unsympathetic advice: “Well, yes, honey, that’s a problem you can fix.”
“I went home and thought about it, and decided that math and science were important to me,” Slatyer says. “I was going to keep doing my best to learn more, and if I got bullied, so be it.”
She doubled down on her studies and spent a lot of time at the library; she also benefited from supportive parents, who gave her Hawking’s groundbreaking book on the origins of the universe and the nature of space and time.
“It seemed like the language in which these ideas could most naturally be described was that of mathematics,” Slatyer says. “I knew I was pretty good at math. And learning that that talent was potentially something I could apply to understanding how the universe worked, and maybe how it began, was very exciting to me.”
Around this same time, the movie “Good Will Hunting” came out in theaters. The story, of a townie custodian at MIT who is discovered as a gifted mathematician, had a motivating impact on Slatyer.
“What my 13-year-old self took out of this was, MIT was a place where, if you were talented at math, people would see that as a good thing rather than something to be stigmatized, and make you welcome — even if you were a janitor or a little girl from Fiji,” Slatyer says. “It was my first real indication that such places might exist. Since then, MIT has been an important symbol to me, of valuing intellectual inquiry and being willing to accept anyone in the world.”
This year, Slatyer received tenure at MIT and is now the Jerrold R. Zacharias Associate Professor of Physics and a member of the Center for Theoretical Physics and the Laboratory for Nuclear Science. She focuses on searching through telescope data for signals of mysterious phenomena such as dark matter, the invisible stuff that makes up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe but has only been detected through its gravitational pull. In her teaching, she seeks to draw out and support a new and diverse crop of junior scientists.
“If you want to understand how the universe works, you want the very best and brightest people,” Slatyer says. “It’s essential that theoretical physics becomes more inclusive and welcoming, both from a moral perspective and to get the best science done.”
Connectivity
Slatyer’s family eventually moved back to Canberra, where she dove eagerly into the city’s educational opportunities.
After earning an undergraduate degree from the Australian National University, followed by a brief stint at the University of Melbourne, Slatyer was accepted to Harvard University as a physics graduate student. Her interests were slowly gravitating toward particle physics, but she was unsure about which direction to take. Then, two of her mentors put her in touch with a junior faculty member, Doug Finkbeiner, who was leading a project to mine astrophysical data for signals of new physics.
At the time, much of the physics community was eagerly anticipating the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider and the release of data on particle interactions at high energies, which could potentially reveal physics beyond the Standard Model.
In contrast, telescopes have long made public their own data on astrophysical phenomena. What if, instead of looking through these data for objects such as black holes and neutron stars that evolved over millions of years, one could comb through it for signals of more fundamental mysteries, such as hints of new elementary particles and even dark matter?
The prospects were new and exciting, and Slatyer promptly took on the challenge.
“Chasing that feeling”
In 2008, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope launched, giving astronomers a new view of the cosmos in the gamma-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum, where high-energy astrophysical phenomena can be seen. Slatyer and Finkbeiner proposed that Fermi’s data might also reveal signals of dark matter, which could theoretically produce high-energy electrons when dark matter particles collide.
In 2009, Fermi made its data available to the public, and Slatyer and Finkbeiner —together with Harvard postdoc Greg Dobler and collaborators at New York University — put their mining tools to work as soon as the data were released online.
The group eventually constructed a map of the Milky Way galaxy, shining in gamma rays, and revealed a fuzzy, egg-like shape. Upon further analysis, led by Slatyer’s fellow PhD student Meng Su, this fuzzy “haze” coalesced into a figure-eight, or double-bubble structure, extending some 25,000 light-years above and below the disc of the Milky Way. Such a structure had never been observed before. The group named the mysterious structure the “Fermi bubbles,” after the telescope that originally observed it.
“It was really special — we were the first people in the history of the world to be able to look at the sky in this way and understand that this structure was there,” Slatyer says. “That’s a really incredible feeling, and chasing that feeling is something that inspires and motivates me, and I think many scientists.”
Searching for the invisible
Today, Slatyer continues to sift through Fermi data for evidence of dark matter. The Fermi Bubbles’ distinctive shape makes it unlikely they are associated with dark matter; they are more likely to reveal a past eruption from the giant black hole at the Milky Way’s center, or outflows fueled by exploding stars. However, other signals are more promising.
Around the center of the Milky Way, where dark matter is thought to concentrate, there is a glow of gamma rays. In 2013, Slatyer, her first PhD student Nicholas Rodd, and collaborators at Harvard University and Fermilab showed this glow had properties similar to what theorists would expect if dark matter particles were colliding and producing visible light. However, in 2015, Slatyer and collaborators at MIT and Princeton University challenged this interpretation with a new analysis, showing that the glow was more consistent with originating from a new population of spinning neutron stars called pulsars.
But the case is not quite closed. Recently, Slatyer and MIT postdoc Rebecca Leane reanalyzed the same data, this time injecting a fake dark matter signal into the data, to see whether the techniques developed in 2015 could detect dark matter if it were there. But the signal was missed, suggesting that if there were other, actual signals of dark matter in the Fermi data, they could have been missed as well.
Slatyer is now improving on data mining techniques to better detect dark matter in the Fermi data, along with other astrophysical open data. But she won’t be discouraged if her search comes up empty.
“There’s no guarantee there is a dark matter signal,” Slatyer says. “But if you never look, you’ll never know. And in searching for dark matter signals in these datasets, you learn other things, like that our galaxy contains giant gamma-ray bubbles, and maybe a new population of pulsars, that no one ever knew about. If you look closely at the data, the universe will often tell you something new.”
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Eric Reid blasts Jay-Z for partnering with NFL ‘It looks like your goal was to make millionsby assisting the NFL in burying Colin’s career’
Carolina Panthers safety Eric Reid slammed Jay-Z for paper chasing by forming a partnership with the NFL and helping to further “bury” Colin Kapernick’s career.
—Jay-Z defends NFL deal with Roc Nation, talks Kaepernick—
Social media was abuzz when the Roc Nation founder sat down Wednesday with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and answered questioned about his new role co-producing the Super Bowl Halftime show and also contributing to Inspire Change, a foundation the NFL started in response to public outrage over their mishandling of Kaepernick’s peaceful #TakeTheKnee protest.
“For me it was about action. What are we gonna’ do with it? … everybody knows I agree with what you’re saying [in Kaepernick’s underlying message]. So what are we gonna do? … [Help] millions and millions of people, or we get stuck on Colin not having a job.”
When asked, would he kneel or would he stand, Jay responded: “I think we’re past kneeling. I think it’s time to go into actionable items.”
Reid, Kapernick’s friend who also protested alongside him criticized the rapper Wednesday night on social media, TMZ reports.
“These aren’t mutually exclusive,” Reid wrote back … “They can both happen at the same time! It looks like your goal was to make millions and millions of dollars by assisting the NFL in burying Colin’s career.”
Jay has many questioning his move but in an audio clip released by TMZ, he defended the partnership saying it was a necessary next step after Charlemagne the God asked him about partnering with the NFL when Kap is still unemployed.
—The Kaepernick Effect: Is Jay-Z’s new deal with the NFL a conflict of interests?—
“No, I don’t want people to stop protesting at all. Kneeling — I know we’re stuck on it because it’s a real thing — but kneeling is a form of protest. I support protest across the board. We need to bring light to the issue. I think everyone knows what the issue is — we’re done with that,” he added. “We all know the issue now. OK, next. What are we moving (on to) next? …And I’m not minimizing that part of it because that has to happen, that’s a necessary part of the process. But now that we all know what’s going on, what are we going to do? How are we going to stop it? Because the kneeling was not about a job, it was about injustice.”
When asked why Kaepernick wasn’t added to the deal, Jay answered:
“You’d have to ask him. I’m not his boss. I can’t just bring him into something. That’s for him to say.”
NYC radio DJ and Kaepernick’s longtime girlfriend Nessa Diab took to social media confirm that the Super Bowl winning quarterback was left out of the conversations.
THIS is a lie. COLIN never spoke to Jay-Z and NFL ahead of that deal being done. They NEVER included him in any discussion 👉🏽 https://t.co/TWmoXS4JVJ pic.twitter.com/2bjSIEtnjQ
— NESSA (@nessnitty) August 14, 2019
I never thought I would see this headline in my lifetime. I can’t put in words the disappointment and disgust #IMWITHKAP FOREVER 👉🏽👉🏽👉🏽Jay-Z Helps the NFL Banish Colin Kaepernick – The Atlantic https://t.co/avK3tc1tBq
— NESSA (@nessnitty) August 15, 2019
The post Eric Reid blasts Jay-Z for partnering with NFL ‘It looks like your goal was to make millionsby assisting the NFL in burying Colin’s career’ appeared first on theGrio.
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