https://www.theatlantic.com

Blinky: the “fake social networking” app that does nothing

▻https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/the-app-that-does-nothing/529764

Binky is an app that does everything an app is expected to do. It’s got posts. It’s got likes. It’s got comments. It’s got the infinitely scrolling timeline found in all social apps, from Facebook to Twitter, Instagram to Snapchat.

I open it and start scrolling. Images of people, foods, and objects appear on and then vanish off the screen. Solar cooker. B.F. Skinner. Shoes. Marmalade. Sports Bra. Michael Jackson. Ganesha. Aurora Borealis. These are “binks,” the name for posts on Binky.

I can “like” a bink by tapping a star, which unleashes an affirming explosion. I can “re-bink” binks, too. I can swipe left to judge them unsavory, Tinder-style, and I can swipe right to signal approval. I am a binker, and I am binking.

There’s just one catch: None of it is real. Binky is a ruse, a Potemkin-Village social network with no people, where the content is fake and feedback disappears into the void. And it might be exactly the thing that smartphone users want—and even need.

[...]

Dan Kurtz, the game developer and improv actor who created Binky, tells me that the idea for the app arose partly from his own feelings after reading through the current updates on Facebook or Twitter while waiting for a train. “I don’t even want that level of cognitive engagement with anything,” he explains, “but I feel like I ought to be looking at my phone, like it’s my default state of being.” Kurtz wondered what it would look like to boil down those services into their purest, most content-free form. This is what people really want from their smartphones. Not content in the sense of quips, photos, and videos, but content as the repetitive action of touching and tapping a glass rectangle with purpose and seeing it nod in response.

Capitalism the Apple Way vs. Capitalism the Google Way - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/apple-google-capitalism/532995

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/07/GettyImages_527365622/facebook.jpg?1499696036

While lots of attention is directed toward identifying the next great start-up, the defining tech-industry story of the last decade has been the rise of Apple and Google. In terms of wealth creation, there is no comparison. Eight years ago, neither one of them was even in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world, and their combined market value was less than $300 billion. Now, Apple and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) have become the two most valuable companies, with a combined market capitalization of over $1.3 trillion. And increasingly, these two behemoths are starting to collide in various markets, from smartphones to home-audio devices to, according to speculation, automobiles.

But the greatest collision between Apple and Google is little noticed. The companies have taken completely different approaches to their shareholders and to the future, one willing to accede to the demands of investors and the other keeping power in the hands of founders and executives. These rival approaches are about something much bigger than just two of the most important companies in the world; they embody two alternative models of capitalism, and the one that wins out will shape the future of the economy.

What has Google done in that same period? Google is, like Apple, making loads of money. From 2013 to March 2017, it generated $114 billion in operating cash flow. How much has the company distributed to shareholders? In contrast to Apple’s 72 percent payout rate, Google has only distributed 6 percent of that money to shareholders.

The paths taken by Apple and Google manifest alternative answers to one of the main questions facing capitalism today: What should public companies do with all of the money that they’re making? Even as corporations have brought in enormous profits, there has been a shortage of lucrative opportunities for investment and growth, creating surpluses of cash. This imbalance has resulted in the pileup of $2 trillion on corporate balance sheets. As companies continue to generate more profits than they need to fund their own growth, the question becomes: Who will decide what to do with all those profits—managers or investors?

The importance of these two models might soon escalate dramatically. There’s a real possibility that tax reform at the federal level will unlock the offshore cash that corporations have amassed, and the subsequent flood of money will have to be reallocated in the economy—somewhere, somehow.

#Economie_numerique #Impôts #Capitalisme_cognitif

Si tu as des calculs rénaux, va plutôt te faire centrifuger chez Disney !

Roller Coasters Could Help People Pass Kidney Stones - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/09/for-kidney-health-roller-coaster-therapy/501278

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2016/09/20160812.GK.6717/facebook.jpg?1474905922

“What was amazing was within just a few rides it became obvious that there was a huge difference in passage rates whether you sat in the front or the rear of the coaster,” Wartinger tells me. “There was a lot more whipping around in that rear car.”

The stones passed 63.89 percent of the time while the kidneys were in the back of the car. When they were in the front, the passage rate was only 16.67 percent. That’s based on only 60 rides on a single coaster, and Wartinger guards his excitement in the journal article: “Preliminary study findings support the anecdotal evidence that a ride on a moderate-intensity roller coaster could benefit some patients with small kidney stones.”

What the ’Crack Baby’Panic Tells us About the Opioid Epidemic - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/what-the-crack-baby-panic-reveals-about-the-opioid-epidemic/533763

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/07/AP_99101501645/lead_960.jpg?1500069863

[...] a recent article in the New York Times by Catherine Saint Louis that chronicles approaches for caring for newborns born to mothers who are addicted to opioids [...] is remarkable in its command and explanation of the medical and policy issues at play in the ongoing epidemic, but its success derives from something more than that. Saint Louis expertly captures the human stories at the intersection of the wonder of childbirth and the grip of drug dependency in a Kentucky hospital, all while keeping the epidemic in view.

[...]

The article is an exemplar in a field of public-health-oriented writing about the opioid crisis—the most deadly and pervasive drug epidemic in American history—that has shaped popular and policy attitudes about the crisis. But the wisdom of that field has not been applied equally in recent history. The story of Jamie Clay and Jay’la Cy’anne stood out to me because it is so incongruous with the stories of “crack babies” and their mothers that I’d grown up reading and watching.

The term itself still stings. “Crack baby” brings to mind hopeless, damaged children with birth defects and intellectual disabilities who would inevitably grow into criminals. It connotes inner-city blackness, and also brings to mind careless, unthinking black mothers who’d knowingly exposed their children to the ravages of cocaine. Although the science that gave the world the term was based on a weak proto-study of only 23 children and has been thoroughly debunked since, the panic about “crack babies” stuck. The term made brutes out of people of color who were living through wave after waves of what were then the deadliest drug epidemics in history.

#deux_poids_deux_mesures #Etats_Unis #racisme #opiacés

Al Jazeera Is At the Center of the Qatar Crisis
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/al-jazeera-qatar-saudi-arabia-muslim-brotherhood/531471

The climate changed in the summer of 2013, after the Egyptian army overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the elected Muslim Brotherhood president. On August 14, as security forces were brutally clearing a pro-Morsi sit-in, an Al Jazeera English presenter asked a Brotherhood spokesperson a valid question: why were women and children still present at a protest that would inevitably be targeted by the authorities? The anchor was almost immediately pulled off the air and reprimanded for being insufficiently sympathetic to the group. For months, she was barred from presenting the news and relegated to a pre-recorded chat show. There was also an internal struggle over how to cover that summer’s protests against Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Still, much of the English programming remains fair and objective—adjectives that no longer apply to its Arabic sister channel. Shortly after the coup against Morsi, Ahmed Mansour, a prominent anchor, was quoted on the Brotherhood’s website as saying that the interim Egyptian president was a Jew carrying out an Israeli plot. Faisal al-Qassim, another presenter, once hosted a segment on whether Syria’s Alawite population deserved genocide. In 2014, the channel’s Iraqi affairs editor tweeted approvingly about the Camp Speicher massacre, in which the Islamic State killed more than 1,500 air-force cadets in Tikrit after singling out the Shia and non-Muslims. Some journalists quit in protest; the ones who remained continue to push a sectarian, pro-Sunni Islamist line. Though Al Jazeera is still widely watched, its reputation has been tarnished as its ratings have dropped.

In Yemen’s secret prisons, #UAE tortures and US interrogates

MUKALLA, Yemen (AP) — Hundreds of men swept up in the hunt for al-Qaida militants have disappeared into a secret network of prisons in southern Yemen where abuse is routine and torture extreme — including the “grill,” in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire, an Associated Press investigation has found.

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Communiquer : An Artificial Intelligence Developed Its Own Non-Human Language. Elle ne sera pas la première : Every Time R2-D2 Saves the Day.
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/artificial-intelligence-develops-its-own-non-human-language/530436
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLmOteqmDYc

Intéressant rappel des rapports compliqués entre le Qatar et ses voisins (depuis bien longtemps): Qatar: The Gulf’s Problem Child
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/qatar-gcc-saudi-arabia-yemen-bahrain/529227

Why Do Coptic Christians Keep Getting Attacked in Egypt? - The Atlantic
H.A. HELLYER

▻https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/1857/11/the-latest-attack-on-coptic-christians-in-light-of-egypt/528330/?preview=qiyvhH6Zxjj1CBpx_5a8zaxtlIg

Sectarian incitement and anti-Christian populism are not limited to the ISIS cohorts and cells in Egypt. ISIS may take the sectarianism to an ultimate conclusion, but before ISIS ever existed in Egypt, a vile sectarianism had already infected far too much of the pro-Islamist universe. It has spread by playing to the baser, more populist sentiments among the pro-Islamist camp.

As Taylor Luck noted earlier this month in the Christian Science Monitor, Muslim antipathy toward Christians has been simmering for a long time, and has occasionally erupted into mob violence:

One of the largest waves of anti-Christian violence was after the 2013 military ouster of Islamist President Mohammad Morsi … and the army’s bloody crackdown against a sit-in by Muslim Brotherhood supporters in which nearly 1,000 Islamists were killed. Brotherhood officials singled out Copts, and particularly Coptic Pope Tawadros, for being complicit in the General Sisi-led military coup, and Christians were the target of angry supporters.

In August 2013, Human Rights Watch reported that mob violence led by Brotherhood supporters damaged 42 churches and dozens of schools and businesses owned by Copts across Egypt, killing several and trapping Christians in their homes.

Islamist circles and some Muslims across Egypt, meanwhile, use rhetoric deriding Christians as a “favored class” that is “hoarding wealth” and benefits from the regime, fault-lines that ISIS is looking to exploit.
We shouldn’t group all of the Islamist camp, whether in Egypt or otherwise, together with ISIS; that would be inaccurate. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that ISIS thrives on sectarian background music that has long been provided by other parts of the Islamist universe, and not only by ISIS’s own media apparatus.

One of many ironies is that if nothing else, Friday’s appalling attack shows, yet again, how unorthodox groups like ISIS really are when it comes to Islam. In one of the many condemnations issued by Muslim religious figures and released today, one particular saying of the Prophet Muhammad’s, recorded in the hadith literature, stood out to me: “Whoever harms a person of the covenant [a non-Muslim in a Muslim territory], I am his adversary; and I will be his adversary on the Day of Judgement.” How much clearer can that be? And yet, those who seek violence will find hermeneutic ways to ignore this direct warning.

Trump Addressed a ’Muslim World’ That Does Not Exist - The Atlantic

“I chose to make my first foreign visit a trip to the heart of the Muslim world,” President Trump said in Riyadh on Sunday, in a speech billed as a call to Muslims to promote a peaceful understanding of Islam and to unite against terrorists.

Riyadh is the capital of Saudi Arabia, but it is not the capital of the Muslim world. In fact, it’s worth remembering that “the Muslim world” is not actually a place. It’s a Western idea built on the faulty racial logic that Muslims live in a world of their own—that Islam is an eastern, foreign religion that properly belongs in a distant, faraway, dusty place. (This is arguably the logic that underlies Trump’s Muslim travel ban, currently held up in the courts: Islam is foreign, “Islam hates us,” Islam cannot possibly be a real American religion and that is why we can ban its adherents. Stephen Miller, an architect of the travel ban, was also reportedly among the writers of Trump’s Islam speech.)....

▻https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/the-muslim-world-is-a-place-that-does-not-exist/527550

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#trump #monde_musulman

A Story of Slavery in Modern America - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490

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Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 4 foot 11, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes that I can still see looking into mine—my first memory. She was 18 years old when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United States, we brought her with us. No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.

Fentanyl Is So Deadly That It’s Changing How First Responders Do Their Jobs - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/05/fentanyl-first-responders/526389

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/05/GettyImages_609942630/lead_960.jpg?1494629463

As the number of fentanyl overdoses in America climbed last fall, the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory released a photo to highlight the drug’s particular dangers. The photo showed two vials. One showed how big a lethal dose of heroin might be: 30 milligrams, a small scoop. The second showed the equivalent for fentanyl: 3 milligrams, a bare sprinkle.

It was a warning to potential users, but also a visual reminder that fentanyl is so potent that it is dangerous even for people might accidentally touch or breath a tiny amount of it. People like police, EMTs, forensic labs technicians, and even funeral directors. A puff of fentanyl from closing a plastic bag is enough to send a full-grown man to the emergency room, as a police officer from New Jersey described in a Drug Enforcement Agency video last fall. The DEA made the video as part of an official warning to law enforcement about the dangers of handling fentanyl.

The unprecedented rise of fentanyl has forced police and crime labs to change how they work. Police departments are using protective gear like Tyvek suits and respirators. Crime labs are looking for new ways to detect fentanyl without opening the bag. And both have stocked up on naloxone, the drug that reverses overdoses, for their employees.

What Is America’s Secret Space Shuttle For? - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/why-so-secretive/525969

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/05/RTS15J3C/facebook.jpg?1494352871

The news that the military had a space shuttle quietly orbiting Earth for more than 700 days came as a surprise (…)
The Air Force has two X-37B spaceplanes, and they’ve flown before—three times, in fact, since 2010. Their mission is to “demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform” for the Air Force,

#espace #armée #navette #États-Unis

How the NSA Threatens National Security
(Bruce Schneier, January 2014)

▻https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-the-nsa-threatens-national-security/282822

Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. [...] I’m also talking about the cost to our society. It breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, as Congress is unable to provide any meaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people are unable to challenge government actions in court. It breaks our commercial systems, as U.S. computer products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom, and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random violence.

It’s not just domestic abuse we have to worry about; it’s the rest of the world, too. The more we choose to eavesdrop on the Internet and other communications technologies, the less we are secure from eavesdropping by others. Our choice isn’t between a digital world where the NSA can eavesdrop and one where the NSA is prevented from eavesdropping; it’s between a digital world that is vulnerable to all attackers, and one that is secure for all users.

#privacy
#surveillance
#Bruce_Schneier

Peter Temin: Economic Mobility Requires the Nearly Impossible - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economic-inequality/524610

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/04/RTR4JJPX/facebook.jpg?1493319681

After divvying up workers like this (and perhaps he does so with too broad of strokes), Temin explains why there are such stark divisions between them. He focuses on how the construction of class and race, and racial prejudice, have created a system that keeps members of the lower classes precisely where they are. He writes that the upper class of FTE workers, who make up just one-fifth of the population, has strategically pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and business-friendly deregulation—to bolster the economic success of some groups and not others, largely along racial lines. “The choices made in the United States include keeping the low-wage sector quiet by mass #incarceration, housing #segregation and disenfranchisement,” Temin writes.

#economie_politique #politique #politique_economique #Etats-Unis #classe #race #prison #désavantage

Along the North Korean Border

With much of the world’s attention once again focused on North Korea, many international photojournalists are doing their best to cover the reclusive country. However, North Korea still tightly restricts the movements of visiting journalists within its borders, and controls what can be photographed. For photographers looking in from just over the border, there may be more freedom of movement, but the subjects in North Korea are aware they are being watched, with many looking back—sometimes giving a smile and wave, or sometimes throwing rocks. Gathered here are photographs from the past few years of North Koreans seen just over the border from parts of China and South Korea.

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▻https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/04/along-the-north-korean-border/523404

#frontières #Corée_du_nord #photographie
cc @reka @albertocampiphoto
via @freakonometrics

Au fait : le bon gros mot-clé à la con du moment chez les journalistes, c’est « plafond de verre » :

– Le Pen à l’épreuve du "plafond de verre"
▻http://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/le-pen-a-l-epreuve-du-plafond-de-verre-1223238

– Présidentielle : Marine Le Pen Peut-Elle Briser Le “Plafond De Verre” ?
▻https://www.forbes.fr/politique/presidentielle-marine-le-pen-face-au-plafond-de-verre-programme-economique

– « Entendu sur Europe 1 : “Le plafond de verre, moi j’y crois pas du tout.” »
▻http://www.europe1.fr/politique/a-henin-beaumont-on-y-croit-enormement-chez-les-supporters-de-le-pen-3309593

– « Elle risque de se heurter à un plafond de verre encore plus épais et plus solide que lors des dernières élections régionales. »
▻https://www.challenges.fr/election-presidentielle-2017/presidentielle-un-premier-tour-decevant-et-historique-pour-marine-le-pen_

– « Quinze ans après son père, la présidente du Front national se qualifie pour le second tour de l’élection présidentielle avec pour ambition de briser ce “plafond de verre” qui continue à maintenir son parti aux marges du pouvoir. »
▻http://www.la-croix.com/France/Politique/Marine-Le-Pen-pari-normalisation-2017-04-23-1200841742

– Présidentielle : Marine Le Pen veut briser son "plafond de verre" à coups d’abstention
▻https://www.marianne.net/politique/presidentielle-marine-le-pen-veut-briser-son-plafond-de-verre-coups-d-abst

– L’Europe : le plafond de verre de Marine Le Pen
▻https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/histoires-politiques/histoires-politiques-17-avril-2017

Alors, espèce de débile, je vais te le dire lentement : le plafond de verre désigne le fait que certaines populations – les femmes, les minorités, les jeunes – n’ont pas accès aux échelons supérieurs des hiérarchies (« plafond »), pour des raisons qui ne sont jamais explicitées, ou non visibles (« de verre »). Le fait que les gens ne votent pas pour une fasciste n’est pas un plafond de verre.

Pour être très clair : tu te rends compte qu’en détournant les mots, tu laisses ainsi entendre que l’extrême-droite française est victime de… préjugés sexistes ?

Who’s Tracking Your Faceprint? - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/who-owns-your-face/520731

“Most people have no idea that this is happening,” said Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, in testimony at the hearing. “The latest generation of this technology will allow law enforcement to scan the face of every man, woman, and child walking in front of a street surveillance camera… Do you have the right to walk down the street without the government secretly scanning your face? Is it a good idea to give government so much power with so few limits?”

How Donald Trump Could Build an Autocracy in the U.S. - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872

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It’s 2021, and President Donald Trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances.

Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The president’s supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.

#USA #autocratie #politique

How the Design of Hotels Makes Housekeepers Invisible
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/hotel-housekeepers-invisible/518550

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