Can you trust anonymous sources in journalism?
To cite an anonymous source, a media outlet must first enjoy a high level of credibility.
Jill Abramson
Jill Abramson is journalist who who has served in the most senior editorial positions at The New York Times, where she was the first woman to serve as Washington Bureau Chief, Managing Editor and Executive Editor. She is also an English lecturer at Harvard University and an author. Her latest book, "Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts," will be released on February 5.
JILL ABRAMSON: Anonymous sourcing was an issue in BuzzFeed's story about Michael Cohen saying he was directed to lie to Congress. The story as I recall was sourced to two people who were involved in an investigation of Trump Tower Moscow. But we don't know who they are. We have to suspend disbelief, and believe the reporters, and decide whether BuzzFeed news and those reporters have our confidence and enjoy a high level of credibility. I actually, after Merchants of Truth, looking so deeply at BuzzFeed news, thinks that they are careful. They have 20 investigative reporters, some quite experienced.
They have great investigative editors. I think that BuzzFeed news does deserve trust. Ben Smith, the editor of BuzzFeed, has made it clear that the two reporters — Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier — had worked on the story for months. And then they finally got hard confirmation from two sources that they were very confident in. So I'm not sure that a rush was one of the contributors to what happened there. And, frankly, I'm holding my breath, hoping that BuzzFeed is able, as soon as possible, to show that its story was true.
I mean, anonymous sources proliferate all over the news landscape. When I was at the Times, my predecessor as executive editor went on a campaign to cut down on them. But I'll give you a big reason why it's so difficult to do so. Because many of the stories where you most commonly see a not anonymous sources are Washington stories. And presidents Bush W and Obama initiated eight separate leak investigations. These were unheard of in an earlier period. And that meant the sources could be prosecuted for leaking classified information. And they were left with jail time, in some cases, and huge legal bills. So that put a deep freeze on sourcing in Washington and people's willingness to put their name behind the information that they're giving.
But information has so much more credibility when it is attached to a named source. It just does. The Times actually succeeded in cutting down on them for a while. But to get crucial information before the public, some anonymous sourcing is just necessary. And news organizations have all different standards for when use of an anonymous source is allowed. And in the case of the Times, a senior editor must know the identity of the source.
- It's difficult for media outlets to stop using anonymous sources because identified past sources have been prosecuted for leaking information to reporters. Anonymity allows the sources to share information with the public with less threats of jail time and huge legal bills.
- We have to suspend disbelief, and believe the reporters when anonymous sources are quoted, and decide whether a news outlet — such as BuzzFeed, amid its recent reporting regarding Michael Cohen — has our confidence and enjoys a high level of credibility.
- Information naturally has more credibility, Abramson says, when it is attached to a named sourced. However, to get some crucial information to the public, there are times when anonymous sourcing is necessary.
Live on Monday: Does the US need one billion people?
What would happen if you tripled the US population? Matthew Yglesias and moderator Charles Duhigg explore the idea on Big Think Live.
28 September, 2020
Big Think LIVE
Is immigration key to bolstering the American economy? Could having one billion Americans secure the US's position as the global superpower?
<p>
Is immigration key to bolstering the American economy? Could having one billion Americans secure the US's position as
<em>the</em> global superpower? What if massive population growth could nourish rural economies and strengthen our country from the inside out? Perhaps these questions are provocative fodder for more debate and contention but, for Matthew Yglesias, asking them and arguing about them is part of the American way. Join him in a conversation moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg as they explore the case for one billion Americans.</p><h2></h2><h2>STREAMING LINKS<br>
<a href="https://youtu.be/FKaApFbTpx4" target="_blank">YouTube</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom/posts/10157677011223527" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="https://edge.bigthink.com/live_streams/111" target="_blank">Big Think Edge</a></h2>
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The surprising future of vaccine technology
We owe a lot to vaccines and the scientists that develop them. But we've only just touched the surface of what vaccines can do.
30 September, 2020
Videos
- "Vaccines are the best thing science has ever given us," says Larry Brilliant, founding president and acting chairman of Skoll Global Threats. From smallpox, to Ebola, to polio, scientists have successful fought viruses and saved millions of lives. So what's next?
- As Covaxx (formerly United Neuroscience) cofounder Lou Reese explains in this video, the issue with vaccines is that they don't work against "non-external threats." This is a problem, especially now when internal threats (things that cause cancers, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses) are killing people more than external threats like viruses.
- The future of vaccine tech, which scientists are already working toward today, is developing safe vaccines to eradicate these destructive internal agents without harming our bodies in the process.
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Think everyone died young in ancient societies? Think again
In fact, the maximum human lifespan has barely changed since we arrived.
30 September, 2020
Photo by Juliet Furst on Unsplash
Surprising Science
You might have seen the cartoon: two cavemen sitting outside their cave knapping stone tools. One says to the other: 'Something's just not right – our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past 30.'
<p>This cartoon reflects a very common view of ancient lifespans, but it is based on a myth. People in the past were not all dead by 30. Ancient documents confirm this. In the 24th century BCE, the Egyptian Vizier Ptahhotep wrote verses about the disintegrations of old age. The ancient Greeks classed old age among the divine curses, and their tombstones attest to survival well past 80 years. Ancient artworks and figurines also depict elderly people: stooped, flabby, wrinkled.</p><p>This is not the only type of evidence, however. Studies on extant traditional people who live far away from modern medicines and markets, such as Tanzania's Hadza or Brazil's Xilixana Yanomami, have demonstrated that the most likely age at death is far higher than most people assume: it's about 70 years old. One study found that although there are differences in rates of death in various populations and periods, especially with regards to violence, there is a remarkable similarity between the mortality profiles of various traditional peoples.</p><p>So it seems that humans evolved with a characteristic lifespan. Mortality <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2007.00171.x">rates</a> in traditional populations are high during infancy, before decreasing sharply to remain constant till about 40 years, then mortality rises to peak at about 70. Most individuals remain healthy and vigorous right through their 60s or beyond, until senescence sets in, which is the physical decline where if one cause fails to kill, another will soon strike the mortal blow.</p><p>So what is the source of the myth that those in the past must have died young? One is to do with what we dig up. When ancient human remains are found, archaeologists and biological anthropologists examine the skeletons and attempt to estimate their sex, age and general health. Markers of growth and development, such as tooth eruption, provide relatively accurate age estimates of children. With adults, however, estimates are based on degeneration.</p>
<p>We are all able to instinctively label people as 'young', 'middle-aged' or 'old' based on appearance and the situations in which we encounter them. Similarly, biological anthropologists use the skeleton rather than, say, hair and wrinkles. We term this 'biological age' as our judgment is based on the physical (and mental) conditions that we see before us, which relate to the biological realities of that person. These will not always correlate with an accurate calendar age, as people are all, well, different. Their appearance and abilities will be related to their genetics, lifestyle, health, attitudes, activity, diet, wealth and a multitude of other factors. These differences will accumulate as the years increase, meaning that once a person reaches the age of about 40 or 50, the differences are too great to allow any one-size-fits-all accuracy in the determination of the calendar age, whether it is done by eye on a living person or by the peer-preferred method of skeletal ageing. The result of this is that those older than middle age are frequently given an open-ended age estimation, like 40+ or 50+ years, meaning that they could be anywhere between forty and a hundred and four, or thereabouts.</p><p>The very term 'average age at death' also contributes to the myth. High infant mortality brings down the average at one end of the age spectrum, and open-ended categories such as '40+' or '50+ years' keep it low at the other. We know that in <a href="http://www.who.int/gho/publications/world_health_statistics/2017/en/" target="_blank">2015</a> the average life expectancy at birth ranged from 50 years in Sierra Leone to 84 years in Japan, and these differences are related to early deaths rather than differences in total lifespan. A better method of estimating lifespan is to look at life expectancy only at adulthood, which takes infant mortality out of the equation; however, the inability to estimate age beyond about 50 years still keeps the average lower than it should be.</p><p>Archaeologists' age estimates, therefore, have been squeezed at both ends of the age spectrum, with the result that individuals who have lived their full lifespan are rendered 'invisible'. This means that we have been unable to fully understand societies in the distant past. In the literate past, functioning older individuals were mostly not treated much differently from the general adult population, but without archaeological identification of the invisible elderly, we cannot say whether this was the case in non-literate societies.</p><p>My colleague Marc Oxenham and I wanted to understand early societies more fully so we <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/oa.2408" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">developed</a> a method for bringing to light the invisible elderly. This method is applicable only to cemetery populations that have seen little change over the life of the cemetery, and without massive inequality between the inhabitants. That way it can be assumed that the people ate similar foods, and behaved in similar ways with their teeth. One such cemetery is Worthy Park near Kingsworthy, Hampshire, where Anglo-Saxons buried their loved ones some 1,500 years ago. It was excavated in the early 1960s.</p>
<p>We measured the wear on the teeth of these people, and then seriated the population from those with the most worn teeth – the oldest – to those with the least worn. We did this for the whole population, not just the elderly, to act as a control. We then matched them against a known model population with a similar age structure, and allocated the individuals with the most worn teeth to the oldest ages. By matching the Worthy Park teeth to the model population, the invisible elderly soon become visible. Not only were we able to see how many people lived to a grand old age, but also which ones were 75 years or older, and which were a few years past 50.</p><p>Seeing the invisible elderly has led to other discoveries. It has often been suggested that more men than women lived to older age in the past because of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, but our study suggests otherwise. We <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319845926_Sex_and_the_elderly_Attitudes_to_long-lived_women_and_men_in_early_Anglo-Saxon_England" target="_blank">applied</a> our method to two other Anglo-Saxon cemeteries as well – Great Chesterford in Essex and the one on Mill Hill, in Deal, Kent – and found that, of the three oldest individuals from each cemetery, seven were women and only two were men. Although not conclusive proof, this suggests that older age spans for women might be part of the human condition.</p><p>We also looked at the treatment of the elderly in their graves. Anglo-Saxon men were often buried with weapons while women were buried with brooches and jewellery including beads and pins. This suggests that men were identified by their martial qualities, while women were admired for their beauty. Men also maintained or increased their status in their graves well into their 60s, while women's 'value' peaked in their 30s and declined further as they aged. Intriguingly, the class of item most likely to be found in the graves of the elderly rather than younger individuals was the grooming tool. The most common of these was tweezers, and most of these were buried with old men. Did this mean that old men were concerned about their looks? Or that old women were too far from beauty for tweezers or other grooming items to help? Findings such as these provide a glimpse into the lives of people of the past, a glimpse that was impossible without identifying the invisible elderly.</p><p>The maximum human lifespan (approximately 125 years) has barely changed since we arrived. It is <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/35041709" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">estimated</a> that if the three main causes of death in old age today – cardiovascular disease, stroke, and cancer – were eliminated, the developed world would see only a 15-year increase in life expectancy. While an individual living to 125 in the distant past would have been extremely rare, it was possible. And some things about the past, such as men being valued for their power and women for their beauty, have changed little.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/3669011d-3efb-478d-9b7b-17022345451f.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>Christine Cave</p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/think-everyone-died-young-in-ancient-societies-think-again" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Mystery anomaly weakens Earth's magnetic field, report scientists
A strange weakness in the Earth's protective magnetic field is growing and possibly splitting, shows data.
28 May, 2020
ESA
Surprising Science
- "The South Atlantic Anomaly" in the Earth's magnetic field is growing and possibly splitting, shows data.
- The information was gathered by the ESA's Swarm Constellation mission satellites.
- The changes may indicate the coming reversal of the North and South Poles.
<p>A portion of the Earth's magnetic field, known as the "South Atlantic Anomaly," is weakening and may be headed for a split, shows new data. The strange phenomenon is also triggering technical problems in Earth-orbiting satellites. </p><p>Our planet's magnetic field is an important part of the defenses that protect us from cosmic radiation and charged particles streaming from the Sun. The field is also the reason compasses and GPS work. It's generated by the ocean of liquid iron in the planet's outer core, about 1800 miles below our feet. The iron acts like "a spinning conductor in a bicycle dynamo," <a href="https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Swarm/Swarm_probes_weakening_of_Earth_s_magnetic_field" target="_blank">explains</a> the press release from the European Space Agency (ESA), which carried out the research. The iron's flow spawns electrical currents that then generate the planet's ever-changing electromagnetic field. The liquid iron core behaves like a giant magnet, causing the existence of the North and South poles.</p>
<p>The scientists were able to establish that the entire magnetic field of the planet has diminished by 9 percent in its strength during the past 200 years. The "South Atlantic Anomaly" segment, which stretches from Africa to South America, is of particular concern. Satellites from ESA's <a href="https://earth.esa.int/web/guest/missions/esa-eo-missions/swarm/mission-overview/constellation" target="_blank">Swarm Constellation</a> mission, that looked into the anomaly detected a strong weakening southwest of Africa, which points to the possibility that the area would break into two different low points.</p><p>While the observed changes don't necessarily mean the Sun is about to fry our planet or some similar calamity, it does indicate that something is happening within the Earth's core. This is what the agency is hoping to figure out through further research. One possibility – the north and south poles are about to switch positions, with the South Atlantic Anomaly being the origin of the transformation (which happens every 250,000 years or so).</p>
<video controls id="ac6c7" width="100%" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="677bdad7e22f2d0cb29b606bce808982" expand="1" feedbacks="true" mime_type="video/mp4" shortcode_id="1590703722974" url="https://roar-assets-auto.rbl.ms/runner%2F17611-2005_028_AR_EN.mp4" videoControls="true"> <source src="https://roar-assets-auto.rbl.ms/runner%2F17611-2005_028_AR_EN.mp4" type="video/mp4"> Your browser does not support the video tag. </video><p>South Atlantic Anomaly impact radiation. Credit: ESA</p>
<p><span style="background-color: initial;">Jürgen Matzka, a researcher into geomagnetism at the <a href="https://www.gfz-potsdam.de/en/home/" target="_blank">GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences</a>, explained in a statement that the new weak spot "</span><span style="background-color: initial;">has appeared over the last decade and in recent years is developing <em>vigorously</em>." He added that we're fortunate to have the Swarm satellites studying the issue, while "the challenge now is to understand the processes in Earth's core driving these changes."</span></p><p>The weakness of the magnetic field has occasionally caused the International Space Station and low-Earth orbit satellites to experience communication and computer issues. </p>
Is the Magnetic Field Reversing?
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Why social media has changed the world — and how to fix it
MIT Professor Sinan Aral's new book, "The Hype Machine," explores the perils and promise of social media in a time of discord.
30 September, 2020
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images for Somerset House
Technology & Innovation
Are you on social media a lot? When is the last time you checked Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Last night? Before breakfast? Five minutes ago?
<p>If so, you are not alone — which is the point, of course. Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have become wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we are connected. Social media taps into this tendency.</p><p>"Human brains have essentially evolved because of sociality more than any other thing," says Sinan Aral, an MIT professor and expert in information technology and marketing. "When you develop a population-scale technology that delivers social signals to the tune of trillions per day in real-time, the rise of social media isn't unexpected. It's like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline."</p><p>The numbers make this clear. In 2005, about 7 percent of American adults used social media. But by 2017, 80 percent of American adults used Facebook alone. About 3.5 billion people on the planet, out of 7.7 billion, are active social media participants. Globally, during a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.</p><p>As social media platforms have grown, though, the once-prevalent, gauzy utopian vision of online community has disappeared. Along with the benefits of easy connectivity and increased information, social media has also become a vehicle for disinformation and political attacks from beyond sovereign borders.</p>
<p>"Social media disrupts our elections, our economy, and our health," says Aral, who is the David Austin Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.</p><p>Now Aral has written a book about it. In "The Hype Machine," published this month by Currency, a Random House imprint, Aral details why social media platforms have become so successful yet so problematic, and suggests ways to improve them.</p><p>As Aral notes, the book covers some of the same territory as "The Social Dilemma," a documentary that is one of the most popular films on Netflix at the moment. But Aral's book, as he puts it, "starts where 'The Social Dilemma' leaves off and goes one step further to ask: What can we do about it?"</p><p>"This machine exists in every facet of our lives," Aral says. "And the question in the book is, what do we do? How do we achieve the promise of this machine and avoid the peril? We're at a crossroads. What we do next is essential, so I want to equip people, policymakers, and platforms to help us achieve the good outcomes and avoid the bad outcomes."</p>
<h3>When "engagement" equals anger</h3><p>"The Hype Machine" draws on Aral's own research about social networks, as well as other findings, from the cognitive sciences, computer science, business, politics, and more. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, for instance, have found that people obtain bigger hits of dopamine — the chemical in our brains highly bound up with motivation and reward — when their social media posts receive more likes.</p><p>At the same time, consider a 2018 MIT study by Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT PhD student and now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College; Deb Roy, MIT professor of media arts and sciences and executive director of the MIT Media Lab; and Aral, who has been studying social networking for 20 years. The three researchers found that on Twitter, from 2006 to 2017, false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. Why? Most likely because false news has greater novelty value compared to the truth, and provokes stronger reactions — especially disgust and surprise.</p><p>In this light, the essential tension surrounding social media companies is that their platforms gain audiences and revenue when posts provoke strong emotional responses, often based on dubious content.</p><p>"This is a well-designed, well-thought-out machine that has objectives it maximizes," Aral says. "The business models that run the social-media industrial complex have a lot to do with the outcomes we're seeing — it's an attention economy, and businesses want you engaged. How do they get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits, and … get you riled up. That's why I call it the hype machine. We know strong emotions get us engaged, so [that favors] anger and salacious content."</p>
<h3>From Russia to marketing</h3><p>"The Hype Machine" explores both the political implications and business dimensions of social media in depth. Certainly social media is fertile terrain for misinformation campaigns. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia spread false information to at least 126 million people on Facebook and another 20 million people on Instagram (which Facebook owns), and was responsible for 10 million tweets. About 44 percent of adult Americans visited a false news source in the final weeks of the campaign.</p><p>"I think we need to be a lot more vigilant than we are," says Aral.</p><p>We do not know if Russia's efforts altered the outcome of the 2016 election, Aral says, though they may have been fairly effective. Curiously, it is not clear if the same is true of most U.S. corporate engagement efforts.</p><p>As Aral examines, digital advertising on most big U.S. online platforms is often wildly ineffective, with academic studies showing that the "lift" generated by ad campaigns — the extent to which they affect consumer action — has been overstated by a factor of hundreds, in some cases. Simply counting clicks on ads is not enough. Instead, online engagement tends to be more effective among new consumers, and when it is targeted well; in that sense, there is a parallel between good marketing and guerilla social media campaigns.</p><p>"The two questions I get asked the most these days," Aral says, "are, one, did Russia succeed in intervening in our democracy? And two, how do I measure the ROI [return on investment] from marketing investments? As I was writing this book, I realized the answer to those two questions is the same."</p>
<h3>Ideas for improvement</h3><p>"The Hype Machine" has received praise from many commentators. Foster Provost, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, says it is a "masterful integration of science, business, law, and policy." Duncan Watts, a university professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says the book is "essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better."</p><p>In that vein, "The Hype Machine" has several detailed suggestions for improving social media. Aral favors automated and user-generated labeling of false news, and limiting revenue-collection that is based on false content. He also calls for firms to help scholars better research the issue of election interference.</p><p>Aral believes federal privacy measures could be useful, if we learn from the benefits and missteps of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and a new California law that lets consumers stop some data-sharing and allows people to find out what information companies have stored about them. He does not endorse breaking up Facebook, and suggests instead that the social media economy needs structural reform. He calls for data portability and interoperability, so "consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another." Aral believes that without such fundamental changes, new platforms will simply replace the old ones, propelled by the network effects that drive the social-media economy.</p><p>"I do not advocate any one silver bullet," says Aral, who emphasizes that changes in four areas together — money, code, norms, and laws — can alter the trajectory of the social media industry.</p><p>But if things continue without change, Aral adds, Facebook and the other social media giants risk substantial civic backlash and user burnout.</p><p>"If you get me angry and riled up, I might click more in the short term, but I might also grow really tired and annoyed by how this is making my life miserable, and I might turn you off entirely," Aral observes. "I mean, that's why we have a Delete Facebook movement, that's why we have a Stop Hate for Profit movement. People are pushing back against the short-term vision, and I think we need to embrace this longer-term vision of a healthier communications ecosystem."</p><p>Changing the social media giants can seem like a tall order. Still, Aral says, these firms are not necessarily destined for domination.</p><p>"I don't think this technology or any other technology has some deterministic endpoint," Aral says. "I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, which is that technology is what we make it, and we are abdicating our responsibility to steer technology toward good and away from bad. That is the path I try to illuminate in this book."</p><p>Reprinted with permission of <a href="http://news.mit.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">MIT News</a>. Read the <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2020/hype-machine-book-aral-0924" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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