Links - 19th April 2019 (2)

Polytechnic student admits to cheating 16 men by posing online as woman offering sex - "Instead of taking heed of a website advisory warning users against scammers plying purported sexual services and pornographic videos, a polytechnic student took inspiration instead and became such a scammer himself."

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Why Phone Fraud Starts With A Silent Call - "these robocalls are on the rise because Internet-powered phones make it cheap and easy for scammers to make illegal calls from anywhere in the world.That initial call you get, with silence on the other end, "[is] essentially the first of the reconnaissance calls that these fraudsters do," Balasubramaniyan says. "They're trying to see: Are they getting a human on the other end? You even cough and it knows you're there."... Company researchers estimate 1 in every 2,200 calls is a fraud attempt. And they've observed an interesting detail about the fraudulent 1-877 numbers. If you call back from your phone — which the criminals dialed — you get the prompt to enter personal data. If you call back from somewhere else, you get "this number has been deactivated." So a regulator or police officer that's trying to crack down will think, incorrectly, it's out of commission."

How To Hide Your Phone Number in Telegram - "The short answer is that there is no way to manually hide your number, and you must have a valid phone number to create and verify your Telegram account.The good news is that you don’t really have to hide your number. Telegram only uses your phone number as verification. A username, which you create when you set up your account, is used for everything else."

Man jailed 19 months for sex with 13-year-old girl and molesting another teen - "Ho brought the girl to the abandoned Brunei Hostel and the two had sex on the top floor. They then hung out at Dhoby Ghaut before heading to Fort Canning Park at night, where they had sex again on a bench.After that day, the girl stopped responding to Ho’s texts as she felt too young to be having sex and regretted the act.The girl’s elder sister also met Ho through Instagram and the two met up to watch a movie. During the outing, Ho told her about his sexual encounter with her younger sister. The girl’s mother came to know of the sexual encounters and made a police report"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Ends and Means - "I certainly wouldn't say anything other than Saudi regime is extremely repressive and despotic and tyrannical, and so on. But it could be worse in the sense that in Yemen, terrible as it is, the Saudis against Iran, and if it didn't fight Iran, Iran’s power in the region would be immeasurably strengthened. Iran has been responsible for the killing of untold numbers of British and American soldiers. Iran poses a direct threat to us in the way that Saudi doesn't. I wonder why you campaign in Saudi so vociferously for reasons I can understand but I don't hear the same campaigning from you against Iran, against China"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Lest We Forget: the Morality of Remembrance - "What he seemed to object to, particularly was not simply his objection to the motives for the wars, but the fact that we were commemorating our people who died. He seemed to think that was somehow illegitimate and it would be, you know, it was a sort of evidence that this was a sort of morally reprehensible thing that we didn't remember everybody else including the people that we fought against. This is ridiculous, because the whole point of Remembrance Sunday is that we commemorate the people who died for us so that we should live in freedom and live"

My Alliance with Science - Posts - "back in the early days of exploration many travelers would simply draw what they found/saw since the means to study, photograph, further explore it didn't exist yet. Well this is where many of our deep sea monster stories come from,because as it turns out many of these drawings may have depicted large tentacled and alienesque appendages emerging from the water giving belief to something larger and more sinister lurking beneath.... however in many cases it was really just whale dicks. Whales often mate in threes so while one male was busy with the female the other male just pops his dick out of the water while swimming around waiting his turn"

God Emperor Trump on Twitter "2019: Sorry but you’ve been banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, PayPal, GoDaddy, and MasterCard because of a racist joke you made in 2007.
Also 2019: Here’s an 11 year old boy in drag dancing for tips in a strip club"

Judith on Twitter - "Canadian feminism is ridiculous. They think they're oppressed by a sexist system that hold women back. While the leader of the country is a proud feminist, who chose a gender balanced cabinet, and who passes feminist theory into law. You aren't oppressed, you are the system!!"

Judith on Twitter - "One thing feminism has done for women, is make it unacceptable to apply a standard of behavior for women. You can't tell a woman to be nice, of behave properly. Like spoiled children, feminists will throw tantrums if they are told to act in the same way they say men should act."

Senator Mehreen Faruqi - Posts - "Solidarity requires a willingness to listen, learn and - crucially - shut up."
Strange, I thought feminism was supposed to be for men too

The Screen - Posts - "In the UK, over half of our Parliament considers themselves to be feminist (53%) yet, according to research from one of the largest feminist organizations in the UK (The Fawcett Society) only 7% of the UK population consider themselves to be feminist. This shows how the feminists are massively over-represented in Parliament (nearly 8 times as much) yet, it is doubtful they will attempt to balance this out for the sake of representation"

ANDREW STARK. Oh, Canada! (New York Review of Books 19.07.18) - "polls show that 80 percent of Canadians value immigration. In fact, those Canadians who most strongly describe themselves as patriotic are also the most supportive of immigration and multiculturalism; in America the opposite is true. And approval of multiculturalism at home is matched by support for multilateralism abroad... It’s the world’s “first post-national state.” There is “no mainstream in Canada.” These starry-eyed utterances diminish the way in which cultural differences strengthen many other countries. They also ignore the fact that Canadian employers often favor job applicants with Canadian work experience, educational credentials, and language skills over candidates with abundant skills and experience acquired in other countries, thus helping to perpetuate an economic, if not a cultural, mainstream that can be difficult for some immigrants to break into... if we are asking why Canada remains uniquely open to immigration and globalization, we must look at a third phenomenon that qualifies as an incomplete conquest, although Russell does not describe it that way. It’s the relationship between Canada’s four western provinces—British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba—and its largest province, Ontario... Canada’s constitutionally enshrined “equalization” system, which ensures that each province has roughly the same fiscal capacity to provide government services, has helped working Canadians stay in their homes and supported communities in troubled economic times. So have a suite of federal agencies dedicated to developing Canada’s poorer regions, along with the country’s much-vaunted public health care system and its well-regulated banking sector, which avoided the American foreclosure crisis... Motivated by its commitment to multicultural pluralism, Canada has long maintained a region-blind approach in deciding whom to admit, and it has reduced its family reunification program. Instead, she observes, Canada selects most of its immigrants on the basis of their labor-market qualifications: their education, training, linguistic abilities, and work experience. That Canada principally admits “people with skills that are thought to contribute to the economy” is, for Bloemraad, a major “reason for…Canadian exceptionalism”... the latest Gallup Global Migrant Acceptance Index confirms that Canada continues to embrace immigration more enthusiastically than either America or Europe (with the exception of Iceland)."

Are Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Better Than Frozen? - "“If you make bread at home, that’s processed,” said Jorg Spieldenner, the head of the public-health nutrition department at Nestlé Research Center. “If you heat something, that’s processed. When you make an egg, that’s processed food. According to the definition.”... In some cases, frozen could be better.Take the example of purchasing a peach in winter in New England, where there are no fresh peaches locally.“I would buy a frozen peach,” said Hugh Acheson, a chef and owner of four restaurants in Georgia. “The problem with the peach that was grown in Chile and then put in a refrigerated system and then put on a ship … is it was grown four months ago.”... “Eat any peach versus no peach at all,” Mozaffarian said. “The main problem with the food supply is bad eating.” If people are eating fruits and vegetables, the health differences in how they’re prepared are “around the margins”... “I’m a cardiologist,” he said, “and I had a patient come in once asking about salmon. He said, ‘I heard there’s PCBs in salmon. Should I be eating wild salmon or farmed salmon?’ I said, ‘Stop smoking.’”"

Skinny genes the 'secret to staying slim' - "Lead researcher Prof Sadaf Farooqi, from the University of Cambridge, called on people to be less judgemental about others' weight."This research shows for the first time that healthy thin people are generally thin because they have a lower burden of genes that increase a person's chances of being overweight and not because they are morally superior, as some people like to suggest," she said."It's easy to rush to judgement and criticise people for their weight but science shows that things are far more complex."We have far less control over our weight than we might wish to think.""

Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s - "it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise... First, people are exposed to more chemicals that might be weight-gain inducing. Pesticides, flame retardants, and the substances in food packaging might all be altering our hormonal processes and tweaking the way our bodies put on and maintain weight.Second, the use of prescription drugs has risen dramatically since the ‘70s and ‘80s. Prozac, the first blockbuster SSRI, came out in 1988. Antidepressants are now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S., and many of them have been linked to weight gain. Finally, Kuk and the other study authors think that the microbiomes of Americans might have somehow changed between the 1980s and now"

Woman who inherited fatal illness to sue doctors in groundbreaking case - "The woman discovered – after giving birth – that her father carried the gene for Huntington’s disease, a degenerative, incurable brain condition. Later she found out she had inherited the gene and that her own daughter, now eight, has a 50% chance of having it.The woman – who cannot be named for legal reasons – says she would have had an abortion had she known about her father’s condition, and is suing the doctors who failed to tell her about the risks she and her child faced"

It’s not just a costume: Chinese people who ditched the jeans for ancient robes - "In 2010, a young woman in Chengdu was attacked by a group of college students because she was wearing traditional Chinese robes.The students thought her dress was a Japanese kimono, forced her to take it off, and burned it in public... Chengdu, the capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province, has a reputation for being more open and culturally liberal than other parts of the country. Some of the most well-known Chinese hip-hop groups, for example, hail from Chengdu."

More Than 1,000 Journalists, Staff Laid Off Across Buzzfeed, AOL, Yahoo, Huffpost - "This is no loss at all given all the fake news produced by a variety of outlets, including the Huffington Post, who shamelessly published a fake news piece by a South African male pretending to be a male-hating feminist that he put together in order to prove the media’s bias. They fell right into his trap because they broadcast the piece on their platform without fact-checking it first. It did, however, blow up in their face and also cost them an editor-in-chief when it was all said and done.But that wasn’t even the first time The Huffington Post was caught in an ethical conundrum. Apart from publishing fake news about #GamerGate, they were also one of the leading outlets exposed for adopting a bias in order to push Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign to help signal boost her prominence within the media sphere, as outlined in leaked documents from Wikileaks."

Journos Meltdown After Being Told 'Learn To Code' In Wake Of Mass Layoffs At HuffPo, Buzzfeed - "Smearing a bunch of children and trying to ruin their lives for smiling is "respectable journalism" -- but making fun of journalists for losing their jobs is just a step too far!"

Here’s Where The ‘Learn To Code’ Meme Originated. Hint: Not 4Chan. - "For days now, journalists on Twitter have been complaining about being harassed by people telling them: “Learn to code.”The phrase started to be used after Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post announced massive layoffs. Laid off reporters started seeing harassment in the meme, and subsequently whined... a Twitter spokesperson told him that “tweeting ‘learn to code’ at any recently laid off journalist will be treated as ‘abusive behavior’ and is a violation of Twitter's Terms of Service.”... With all the fuss surrounding the meme, the question became: Where did “learn to code” come from? The answer? From journalists themselves, during the Obama administration... NPR, Wired, The New York Times and many other outlets ran with these stories, which seemed to some as elite media outlets mocking blue-collar workers for losing their jobs. Now people on Twitter are turning this around on journalists who have lost their jobs, because if it’s so easy for a coal worker to start a new career as a coder, surely the elite, educated, smarter-than-the-rest-of-us journalists and opinion writers can learn it as well.Of course, since “journalists” can’t be expected to do even a modicum of research, they blamed the “harassment” on 4chan, searching for posts celebrating reporters losing their jobs and bragging about telling them to “learn to code.”"

Ex-HuffPost Deputy Opinion Editor Chloe Angyal - "Our goals for this month were: less than 50% white authors (check!), Asian representation that matches or exceeds the US population (check!), more trans and non-binary authors (check, but I want to do better)."
"Like so many talented and lovely journalists, I was laid off today.If you're in the market for an opinion editor with a huge and diverse rolodex, or a columnist with 10 years of writing about gender politics (and a literal PhD in romantic comedies) under her belt, talk to me."
That could be one way to hit their goals...