Sunday, September 20, 2020

Links - 20th September 2020 (1)

How to Record Vocals for Karaoke | How to Use Audacity - YouTube
With the current version you need to press Shift+R, not record (as one comment pointed out)

Matthew Higham on Twitter - "This power line happened to be laid straight through the skull of an Anglo Saxon woman buried in a previously undiscovered 6th century graveyard."
"@AventuraObscura This was actually my very first archaeological dig in Oakington, UK 2014. We named her "Piper." Took a bit to get that photo, but you can see some of the grave goods she was buried with (some beautiful brooches and a necklace)"

Recursive patterns in online echo chambers - "Despite their entertainment oriented purpose, social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized groups around a common system of beliefs. Confirmation bias helps to account for users’ decisions about whether to spread content, thus creating informational cascades within identifiable communities. At the same time, aggregation of favored information within those communities reinforces selective exposure and group polarization. Along this path, through a thorough quantitative analysis we approach connectivity patterns of 1.2 M Facebook users engaged with two very conflicting narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. Analyzing such data, we quantitatively investigate the effect of two mechanisms (namely challenge avoidance and reinforcement seeking) behind confirmation bias, one of the major drivers of human behavior in social media. We find that challenge avoidance mechanism triggers the emergence of two distinct and polarized groups of users (i.e., echo chambers) who also tend to be surrounded by friends having similar systems of beliefs. Through a network based approach, we show how the reinforcement seeking mechanism limits the influence of neighbors and primarily drives the selection and diffusion of contents even among like-minded users, thus fostering the formation of highly polarized sub-clusters within the same echo chamber. Finally, we show that polarized users reinforce their preexisting beliefs by leveraging the activity of their like-minded neighbors, and this trend grows with the user engagement suggesting how peer influence acts as a support for reinforcement seeking."
This provides yet more empirical support for preference falsification and virtue signalling

Echo Chambers on Social Media: A comparative analysis - "Recent studies have shown that online users tend to select information adhering to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups - i.e., echo chambers - around a shared narrative. Although a quantitative methodology for their identification is still missing, the phenomenon of echo chambers is widely debated both at scientific and political level. To shed light on this issue, we introduce an operational definition of echo chambers and perform a massive comparative analysis on more than 1B pieces of contents produced by 1M users on four social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Gab. We infer the leaning of users about controversial topics - ranging from vaccines to abortion - and reconstruct their interaction networks by analyzing different features, such as shared links domain, followed pages, follower relationship and commented posts. Our method quantifies the existence of echo-chambers along two main dimensions: homophily in the interaction networks and bias in the information diffusion toward likely-minded peers. We find peculiar differences across social media. Indeed, while Facebook and Twitter present clear-cut echo chambers in all the observed dataset, Reddit and Gab do not. Finally, we test the role of the social media platform on news consumption by comparing Reddit and Facebook. Again, we find support for the hypothesis that platforms implementing news feed algorithms like Facebook may elicit the emergence of echo-chambers."

Echo Chambers: Emotional Contagion and Group Polarization on Facebook - "we explore the interplay between emotional state and engagement of users in the group dynamics. Our findings show that communities’ emotional behavior is affected by the users’ involvement inside the echo chamber. Indeed, to an higher involvement corresponds a more negative approach. Moreover, we observe that, on average, more active users show a faster shift towards the negativity than less active ones."
The more active you are inside your social media echo chamber, the more upset you become

Extremists More Willing To Share Their Opinions, Study Finds - "People with relatively extreme opinions may be more willing to publicly share their views than those with more moderate views, according to a new study.The key is that the extremists have to believe that more people share their views than actually do, the research found.The results may offer one possible explanation for our fractured political climate in the United States, where extreme liberal and conservative opinions often seem to dominate... The average student's views were near the mid-point of the scale -- but most rated the typical Stanford student as more pro-alcohol than themselves... Take as an example a community that tends to be moderate politically, but leans slightly liberal.People with more extreme liberal views in the community may be more likely than others to attend publicly visible protests and display bumper stickers espousing their liberal views, because they think the community supports them."Everyone else sees these extreme opinions being expressed on a regular basis and they may eventually come to believe their community is more liberal than it actually is," Morrison said. "The same process could occur in moderately conservative communities."You have a cycle that feeds on itself: the more you hear these extremists expressing their opinions, the more you are going to believe that those extreme beliefs are normal for your community.""

Seeing racism everywhere is not OK - "Considering the amount of publicity they get, one could be forgiven for thinking that white supremacists are a major force on the political landscape... the OK hand sign, that near-enough universal finger-and-thumb indication of affirmation or assent, has now been appropriated by racists. That is according to the Anti-Defamation League... How have white supremacists, these merchants of hate, managed to reach such levels of prominence and power? Is it through great marketing? The promise of a fulfilling life burning crosses in the woods? Or perhaps their racist arguments now resonate with an ever-growing number of people? If it were any of those reasons, we would be justified in seriously panicking. But the facts tell a different story.The biggest white-supremacist protest in recent decades, in Charlottesville, Virginia, attracted only a few hundred people. Richard Spencer, the most prominent figure in the white supremacist movement, has 77,000 followers on Twitter (and presumably not all of them subscribe to his views). And the claim that the OK symbol is white supremacist started off as a joke, on an internet messageboard, intended to troll self-styled lefties. So who is artificially inflating this movement’s strength? Who is empowering it? Oddly enough, it is the very people who are dedicated to opposing it.Organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League, which are dedicated to monitoring and combating ‘hate speech’, need to point to instances of it in order to justify their existence... Campaigning organisations like the ADL will claim they are raising awareness of the far-right threat in our midst. But their headline-grabbing activity is having the opposite ‘boy who cried wolf’ effect. Moreover, by finding signs of racism everywhere, even in an innocuous hand gesture, they are bringing actual racists into the mainstream by proxy."

Investigators conclude hand gestures at Army-Navy game were not racist. - "Investigators at the Navy and Military academies came to the conclusion that cadets and midshipmen who flashed controversial hand gestures during a televised pregame show last week were playing “the circle game” and not expressing a white supremacist message"
Duh
Of course liberals were bashing the investigations as biased and a coverup

Covington 2: Newsrooms falsely accuse West Point cadets of flashing ‘white supremacy’ symbol - "the “OK” hand gesture attributed to white supremacists is right-side up (fingers pointing upwards). The hand gestures seen on national television this weekend at the Army-Navy game show the cadets’ hands pointing downward and sideways because they are playing the “circle game,” not pledging their allegiance to white supremacy, you unbelievable idiots.Amazingly, the United States Naval Academy and United States Military Academy have launched separate investigations into their cadets. The media, meanwhile, are treating the story as though they're near-certain the students flashed "white supremacist" symbols on television... “White power symbols,” said NFL columnist Mike Freeman. “From Army cadets. Knowing they are on live television. Trump emboldens this trash. He absolutely does. These guys should be kicked out immediately.”... “Whatever it used to mean,” said CNN contributing opinion writer Jeff Yang, “this symbol used in this fashion is now indelibly associated with white supremacist individuals and agendas, and these cadets are making it on national TV, behind the head of a cadet of color.”Put another way: Even if they didn't mean it, they're still guilty."

Following discovery of 'circle game' photos, OPRF will pay $53K to reprint student yearbooks - Chicago Tribune - "officials found 18 photos inside of students making an upside-down “OK” gesture. The school said the students flashing the sign were of “of various races, ethnicities, genders and grades.”"
I guess $53k is cheap to virtue signal

Shailja Patel on Twitter - "I keep seeing people I respect sharing that "Buy more books than you can ever read" BS piece in Fast Capitalism. What is it about the word "books" that casts a magic veil over naked commodity fetishism?
DEMAND LIBRARIES.
FUND LIBRARIES.
USE LIBRARIES.
"Buy more food than you can ever eat."
"Buy more albums than you can ever listen to."
"Buy more art than you can ever look at."
"Buy more shoes than you can ever wear."
"Buy more cars than you can ever drive."
"Buy more houses than you can ever live in."
"Buy more buy more BUY"
I believe deeply in the value and power of books. That value and power lie in their circulation. Not in their accumulation.
I grew up in a home where books were luxuries. My parents owned very few books, and they were precious. School libraries and public libraries were everything to me. I want my book in the hands of everyone who needs to read it. Not sitting unread in private collections.
If you love books, and have disposable income to spend on books, please spend it on putting books into public circulation. On giving rather than hoarding books. On sharing rather than accumulating books. On getting books to everyone hungry to read them and be transformed."

The Rise And Fall Of The Comanche 'Empire' - "On what the raid on the Parker fort was like
"This is what Indians did to Indians and this just happened to be Indians meeting whites. But the automatic thing in battle is that all the adult males would be killed. That was automatic. That was one of the reasons that Indians fought to the death. The white men were astonished by it but they were assumed that they would be killed. Small children were killed. Very small children were killed. A lot of the children in say, the 3-10 range were often taken as captives. The women were often raped and often killed. And all of the people in those settlements back in those years knew what a Comanche raid was — knew what a Comanche raid meant. ... And it's an interesting kind of moral question as a historian about Plains Indians or American Indians in general. You have to come to terms with this — with torture, which they practiced all across the West — and these kind of grisly practices that scared white people to death."
On rewriting history to leave out Native American atrocities
"There was even an attempt at one point to deny that Indians were warlike. Comanches were incredibly warlike. They swept everyone off the Southern plains. They nearly exterminated the Apaches.""
On Pre-Columbian genocide which always gets ignored in order to shit on white people
Naturally a meme on this subject got wiped from "Archaeology/History Jokes & Puns (Or GTFO!)" - nothing can be allowed to challenge the liberal narrative

Iroquois Indians - Ohio History Central - "the Erie natives were related to the Iroquois. They lived along the eastern shores of Lake Erie in New York and Pennsylvania. The Iroquois Confederacy considered them enemies and wiped out the entire tribe."

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