“Inbar is an eminent, influential, and highly cited researcher with a Ph.D. in social psychology from Cornell University. There is no question that he is qualified. Anyone worth their salt doing work on political polarization knows Inbar’s name. Inbar also jumped through all the hoops UCLA put up for the job, including submitting a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement, which is currently all the rage in colleges and universities. He even shares the politics of the majority of the psychology department. But on his podcast, Inbar had expressed relatively mild concerns over the ideological pressures that DEI statements impose and wondered aloud whether they do harm to diversity of thought.
As a result of this petition—signed by only 66 students—UCLA did not hire Inbar. And he’s not the only academic this has happened to. Far from it.”
“The latest wave of fearmongering about TikTok involves a study purportedly showing that the app suppresses content unflattering to China. The study attracted a lot of coverage in the American media, with some declaring it all the more reason to ban the video-sharing app.”
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“But there are serious flaws in the study design that undermine its conclusions and any panicky takeaways from them.
In the study, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) compared the use of specific hashtags on Instagram (owned by the U.S. company Meta) and on TikTok (owned by the Chinese company ByteDance). The analysis included hashtags related both to general subjects and to “China sensitive topics” such as Uyghurs, Tibet, and Tiananmen Square. “While ratios for non-sensitive topics (e.g., general political and pop-culture) generally followed user ratios (~2:1), ratios for topics sensitive to the Chinese Government were much higher (>10:1),” states the report, titled “A Tik-Tok-ing Timebomb: How TikTok’s Global Platform Anomalies Align with the Chinese Communist Party’s Geostrategic Objectives.”
The study concludes that there is “a strong possibility that TikTok systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is aligned with or opposed to the interests of the Chinese Government.”
There are ample reasons to be skeptical of this conclusion. Paul Matzko pointed out some of these in a recent Cato Institute blog post, identifying “two remarkably basic errors that call into question the fundamental utility of the report.””
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“the researchers fail to account for differences in how long the two social networks in question have been around. Instagram launched nearly 7 years before TikTok’s international launch (and nearly 6 years before TikTok existed at all) and introduced hashtags a few months thereafter (in January 2011). Yet the researchers’ data collection process does not seem to account for the different launch dates, nor does their report even mention this disparity. (Reason reached out to the study authors last week to ask about this but has not received a response.)
The researchers also fail to account for the fact that Instagram and TikTok users are not identical. This leads them “to miss the potential for generational cohort effects,” suggested Matzko. “In short, the median user of Instagram is older than the median user of TikTok. Compare the largest segment of users by age on each platform: 25% of TikTok users in the US are ages 10–19, while 27.4% of Instagram users are 25–34.”
It’s easy to imagine how differing launch dates and typical-user ages could lead to differences in content prevalence, with no nefarious meddling by the Chinese government or algorithmic fiddling by Bytedance needed.”
“Putting all the provisions together, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the deal will lift about 400,000 children out of poverty, and make another 3 million less poor, in its first year. By 2025, it will be keeping 500,000 children a year out of poverty. The Tax Policy Center finds that the bulk of the tax cut will go to families earning $20,000 to $40,000 a year, with most families in the bottom fifth of the income scale getting a tax cut. Because of the business tax cuts, the total package winds up concentrating its benefits at the bottom and at the very top of the income scale.
While nothing to sneeze at, this is a far cry from the roughly 3 million children that would been lifted out of poverty in 2022 if the 2021 expansion of the credit had been extended. It is a dramatically more modest step. It also takes as a given that the credit will not be available to families with zero earnings, a key disagreement between Democratic and Republican legislators on which the latter have shown no flexibility.”
“companies such as John Deere have vertically integrated the entire ecosystem for equipment, requiring customers to purchase repair services exclusively from dealers and using software to prevent independent repairs.
Whenever software has been used to prevent the owners of products from altering or repairing their property, groups of ideologically driven individuals have used their skills to circumvent such constraints. Agricultural equipment is no different, and hackers have taken it upon themselves to “jailbreak” or open up the closed software systems that prevent independent repairs. In the words of one such hacker, “We want farmers to be able to repair their stuff for when things go wrong, and now that means being able to repair or make decisions about the software in their tractors.”
Hackers have now developed tools that would give power back to the owners of farm equipment, allowing farmers unversed in handling software to circumvent manufacturers’ software locks and independently make repairs and service their equipment. There’s only one problem with this movement to liberate the tractors: It’s a violation of federal copyright law.”
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“The ways in which John Deere and other corporations have used the copyright system is a glaring example of regulatory capture in action, highlighting the absurdity of a system where owning a product doesn’t necessarily convey the right to fully control it. There are certainly circumstances where the manufacturers are justified in protecting their products from tampering, but such cases should be handled through warranty nullification and contract law, not through exorbitant fines and lengthy prison sentences.
With the Farm Bill up for reauthorization, Congress is in a perfect position to reform Section 1201 of the DMCA, giving farmers, hackers, and the owners of all types of tech the freedom to repair. ”
“While many are put off by the persistent score gaps across racial and economic lines, the idea that ditching the test will help minority students or those from low-income families is short-sighted. Yes, SAT scores correlate with income and race—but so do high school GPAs and essays, the other metrics elite colleges most often rely on in the absence of test scores.
GPA is a particularly muddy metric to rely on when making admissions decisions for highly selective colleges, as rigor—and grade inflation—varies widely between high schools. Leonhardt highlighted two recent studies that show this. One found that SAT scores were much more predictive of success (such as being admitted to a top graduate school or being employed by a prestigious firm) than high school GPA. The second found that college grades were much better predicted by standardized test scores than by high school grades.”
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“Ultimately, those who stand to benefit most from test-optional admissions aren’t disadvantaged students but mediocre wealthy ones. Standardized test scores, while imperfect, are the closest to an objective measure colleges have for making admissions decisions—one that isolates academic achievement from expensive extracurriculars and tutor-polished essays.”
“A cruise missile launched by the Houthis into the Red Sea on Tuesday night came within a mile of a US destroyer before it was shot down, four US officials told CNN, the closest a Houthi attack has come to a US warship.
In the past, these missiles have been intercepted by US destroyers in the area at a range of eight miles or more, the officials said. But the USS Gravely had to use its Close-In Weapon System (CIWS) for the first time since the US began intercepting the Houthi missiles late last year, which ultimately succeeded in downing the missile, officials said.
The CIWS, an automated machine gun designed for close-range intercepts, is one of the final defensive lines the ship has to shoot down an incoming missile when other layers of defense have failed to intercept it.
The episode underscores the threat the Houthis continue to pose to US naval assets and commercial shipping in the Red Sea, despite multiple US and British strikes on Houthi infrastructure inside Yemen. The close call also comes just days after three US service members were killed in a drone attack by Iran-backed militants at a US outpost in Jordan.”
“Republicans are hoping to renew three business world deductions from the 2017 Trump tax cuts that have begun to phase out in recent years. Those provisions would allow companies to deduct more for things like research and development, equipment investments, and interest costs.
For the Democrats, the child tax credit would receive a new expansion that would allow poorer families greater access to the credit. One report from the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that 16 million children in lower-income households would benefit from the enhancement with a half a million of them lifted above the poverty line.
The deal includes a range of other provisions around issues like double taxation for companies that operate in Taiwan, additional assistance for disaster-struck communities; the costs of the bill would be paid for by implementing changes to a pandemic-era employee retention tax credit.
This bill — if enacted — would serve as a stopgap of sorts ahead of a tax debate in 2025, which will center around an array of provisions in the 2017 Trump tax cuts that are set to expire on Dec. 31, 2025.”