Gongol.com Archives: July 2019
July 5, 2019
This news isn't "fake", it's "enhanced"
The ABC television affiliate in Chicago is going to start integrating more animation and visual effects into news stories in order to enhance the product. It's being done in tandem with a journalism school, but this for sure will require very careful scrutiny.
"Bad ideas are spreading like the plague"
A thoughtful contribution from Stephanie Slade: "What unites the left's flirtation with socialism and the right's move toward nationalism is the willful discarding of long-understood, dearly learned truths about how to make the world a better place." The only comfort to be found in the resurgences of hard-left socialism and witless nationalism is that the classical liberal tradition has survived these clashes before, and ultimately triumphed. It's just that there's so much collateral damage in the meantime.
Facebook says it's clamping down on "sensational health claims"
At least, they're doing so in the news feed by busting down posts that appear to make exaggerated claims about health (using algorithmic management of phrases that are associated with those kinds of claims), and by doing the same for posts that appear to be selling something on the basis of exaggerated claims. Good, probably. But it did not escape one reporter's notice that nothing was said about groups, where really bad misinformation spreads like wildfire.
World's tallest modular building finished at 459'
There are actually two of them, side-by-side in Singapore. Most of the 40-story building, made of precast concrete, was fabricated in Malaysia.
67 years, and no more MAD Magazine
Weird Al Yankovic isn't the only one who's going to miss the publication. Satire is an important art form, and while MAD has always been a sort of gateway drug to higher forms of satire. "The Hollywood Reporter" says they have sources confirming that it will only feature new content in end-of-year specials, but in the words of a MAD cartoonist, "for all intents and purposes, MAD is folding."
