“Gathering and analyzing comments from the public is an important part of the Federal Communications Commission’s rulemaking process,” the American agency says on its website. But analyzing those comments increasingly means reading the thoughts of spambots.
If you are thinking of risking your life to make the perilous journey from Syria to Europe, you could do better than the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesvos. According to Google Maps, it only has an overall score of 2.1 stars out of 5.
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Learning Chinese is a thing now. Mark Zuckerberg is doing it. Donald Trump’s granddaughter memorized a 13th-century Chinese poem for Xi Jinping, the president of China. Many Hollywood films depict celebrities speaking bad Chinese.
You might be wondering why some Asian languages are still limited to 140 characters, while Twitter is expanding the upper limit to 280 for English and others. Here is our explainer, in 280 characters:
The field of international relations is a bountiful source of jargon. There’s “operationalize,” “engagement,” “Thucydides trap,” and so on. Sometimes, though, terms escape the field and make it into the mainstream.
In a diary discovered after the fall of Berlin, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels outlined his principles (pdf) for effective propaganda. The second of these states that it “must be planned and executed by only one authority.”
Xi Jinping, the leader of China, has a multitude of fancy-sounding titles. He is the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and the “core leader.” The list goes on.
Hey Don Jr.,
Vocabulary pop quiz. Define the following words: “hypergamy,” “femoids,” “meeks.” If you got all of those right, you’re on your way to becoming fluent in alt-right.
Last year, we recommended several DIY Halloween costume ideas for you, the cosmopolitan, always-connected participant in the new global economy. These included: Brexiteer, Davos Man, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sexy Mark Zuckerberg.
Despite the attention Donald Trump pays to “the cyber,” his administration is not known for its tech-savvy. That might be why the mp3 files for his weekly addresses have not been updated since he took office, and still show “President Barack Obama” as the artist.
Facebook is testing out a new feature that would move news stories posted by publishers away from people’s existing news feeds and into a new, hard-to-find “Explore” page.
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, thinks kids around the world should learn to code instead of studying English as a second language. That is a mistake, because it’s very difficult to become a good or even decent programmer without working knowledge of English.
The field of artificial intelligence may finally be coming back around to Douglas Hofstadter. Since winning a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter, 72, has been quietly thinking about thinking, and how we might get computers to do it.
Debates about immigration often lead to the topic of language. Donald Trump believes that only English should be spoken in the United States. In August he backed a bill that would evaluate prospective immigrants on a points system, with more points given for demonstrating English language ability. “Whether people like it or not, that’s how we assimilate,” Trump said in 2015.
The UK’s national statistics office recently released the latest data on baby names in England and Wales. It says the following: “Oliver remains as the most popular first name given to baby boys in England and Wales in 2016.” But that’s not really true. In fact, the most common name by far is Muhammad.
Who do you think is the more effective world leader: Vladimir Putin, or Angela Merkel? Donald Trump, or Xi Jinping? Justin Trudeau, with his projections of tolerance, or Kim Jong-un, with his powerful projectiles?
This summer Chinese authorities deepened a crackdown on virtual private networks (VPNs)—tools that help internet users inside the mainland access the open, uncensored web. While not a blanket ban, the new restrictions are shifting the services out of their legal grey area and further toward a black one. In July alone, one popular made-in-China VPN abruptly ceased operations, Apple removed dozens of VPN apps from its China-facing app store, and some international hotels stopped offering VPN services as part of their in-house wifi.
US president Donald Trump’s first address to the UN general assembly this morning was, for him, relatively disciplined. He spoke slowly and stuck closely to a script—albeit one full of incendiary and unconventional statements. Among the most extreme was his claim that “if [the United States] is forced to defend itself and its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
US president Donald Trump’s administration has just announced it will repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program instituted by his predecessor, Barack Obama. The program prevents deportation of so-called “Dreamers,” people who were brought to the US illegally as children and have since built lives there, often attending American high schools and joining the military.
The Chinese government under president Xi Jinping is continuing to make life on the internet difficult for its potential detractors. Yesterday (Aug. 25), the country’s highest internet regulator released new rules (link in Chinese) that govern who can post what online. The upshot: anonymity on the Chinese internet is just about dead.
Today (Aug. 26) two men will beat the crap out of each other and a bunch of other (mostly) men will win or lose a lot of money depending on who beat more crap out of whom. But how much they win or lose depends on the betting odds for the fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, which have changed dramatically since they were first recorded.
Facebook and Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) have returned after maintenance gave their over 2 billion users a harrowing glimpse into a post-apocalyptic future without instant access to weird memes, combative political updates, and other people’s great lives.
