Category: Others

Sinan Aral and his team discovered an interesting fact about fake news: it travels much faster than real news. For example, an article about Barack Obama possibly being injured was shared many more times than real news about this former president. This is because fake news is always much more surprising than real news, and people feel that they have been given a secret, urging them to send it to someone else. Aral gives several solutions to this. However, they all have their bad effects. 

I believe one of the most important ones is labeling types of media. For example, much of the food we eat is labeled with details, but when it comes to the information we take in, not much is. When information is specified, it can tell us if the source is credible or where the source came from. Knowing this data, people can detect if something is real or false more easily. On the other hand, one big question is: who gets to decide what the labels are? Nevertheless, I believe that we should at least try this technique when trying to solve this issue. 

Another solution to this problem is to use technology to figure out which news is fake, and which is not. Artificial Intelligence has a good reputation, such as Alexa from Amazon or Google Home. Using machine learning could slow down how fast these news are being spread much better than us humans could. Although this solution may seem almost faultless, there is one huge mistake in this. Machines do not know the ethics and philosophy of what is truth and what are lies. 

I think that we, as humans, should try harder to find more solutions to implement in order to prevent fake news, which can create national disruption, such as the false news about President Obama being injured. 

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a fun and famous short story written by James Thurber. In this story, a man named Walter Mitty has trouble facing reality so he resorts to daydreaming constantly. Mitty has daydreams about being a hero and an extremely successful man. A major theme portrayed in this story is escapism from the dull everyday reality. This is a main theme, as Walter Mitty relies on his daydreaming to get by with his average life and nagging wife.

I personally do not agree with how Walter Mitty avoids his everyday lifestyle, as of many reasons. First of all, Walter is putting himself out as a brave hero that has a perfect life. This is wrong, since his dream life does not exist. To elaborate, if Walter Mitty was to continue living in his fantasies, he would not be able to face real life hardships. Another reason why Walter should face reality, is that he would overlook hard work, and lose the quality of working to success.

All in all, I can conclude that Walter Mitty should not indulge in his fantasies. This is shown in the story by Walter Mitty dreaming himself up as a successful and heroic man. When Walter would do this, he was creating a fake fantasy where he got what he wanted without hard work or pain. In conclusion, even though one can easily live in a dream world by escaping reality, they will lose the main aspects of life.

In the Ted talk of Misinformation, one person talked about how misinformation affects society and how they are trying to stop it.

One time, there was a tweet about how the White House was bombed and President Barack Obama was injured from the bombing. There were over four thousand retweets on this within less than five minutes. This was tweeted by serial hackers. The stock market was hit, wiping out 139 billion dollars with a single day.

The false news travel much deeper, faster, and farther than what truth news would. They wondered why it would travel much more. They thought it was because the people who tweeted the false news had more followers or followed more people. In fact, it was the total opposite. They had fewer followers, followed fewer people, were less active on the social media, and were on the media for much less time than people who sent the truth out to people. Despite these things, false and fake news had a better chance of being retweeted than the true news.

The human brain is drawn to new, surprising, and scarier news. Bots were not behind the false news, but humans. This is all the good news about the misinformation.

There is a generator network and a discriminator network. The generator is the noise source of the the media. There is a generator example and a real example. The generator example is the false example. The discriminator network shows which tweet is real or fake. The generator example is trying to fool the discriminator into thinking the fake is real.

An example is that a news reporter is making it look like that the White House intern. They removed frames from this video in order to make it seem very real. Stunt men and woman did this all the time in movies to make it realistic.

There are five different paths to try and address the difficult problems. The first one is labeling. In a grocery store, the products have labels to see how many calories and many more things about it. We don’t know where this information was gathered so it could be fake or real so we are consuming information.

What we don’t know is that who decides which tweet is fake and which is real. People can get advertising dollars for this and the serial hackers can be doing this for money, but we don’t know. We don’t know the dangers of this.

Malaysia created a law where if you were to tweet false and fake news, you were to be put in jail for six whole years. We are trying to end this, but it the best way is by humans not doing this.

By the false news rising and with us not knowing which is fake and which is real, this could be the end of reality with not knowing the knowledge of good and bad and fake and real.

This ted talk was really nice and it tought me a lot of stuff. The first time I heard about fake news was when my friends told me, it was by/from Donald Trump. At that time i knew what fake news meant. Because just put the fake in front of news easy. That was the first time I heard about fake news.

Then again now we saw it again. wow. Fake news of Obama and other stuff. AT first i thought they sent fake news to get more followers. But actually they get less. So it can’t be that. The rest i Don’t know sad. I think this is too short is it.

Have you ever met or had a friend that daydreams and thinks their someone that their not. Come on, everyone does. You might be wondering no I have not seen anyone who’s daydreaming, or no I have never daydreamed before. However, it turned out that nearly everyone, daydreams on a regular basis, studies also indicate that as many as 96% of adults daydreams every day. But have you ever wondered why do I daydream or why don’t I know that I’m thinking daydreaming? It turned out that types of daydreams also affects how much you forget. according to Delaney and colleagues’ research. “When people working on a task were asked to daydream about their childhood home, the older subjects forgot more of the interrupted task than the younger subjects did.” Therefore this also showed that daydreams also depended on age and what you “dream” about. There are two reasons why that have happened.

Though some people may think of daydreaming as something they do unintentionally, research shows that people sometimes zone out on purpose. Research also showed that the people that have unintentionally daydream, have a different dream than someone that zone out “on purpose”.(according to findings published in March 2016 in the journal Psychological Science.) Researchers said they think that people intentionally let their minds wander during easy tasks, however, it only happens when the person knows that is an easy task or when then already know they will get a good outcome.

Moreover, people can still just wander off just because of constantly blinking and looking in one spot. They also have found that people that are doing a problem or just thanking during the moments when their minds wandered blinks more compared with the moments in which they were more focused on the task. Also ff you are stuck on a problem, letting your mind wander for a bit may help you get unstuck. this is what I call resetting the brain, it is a way of having a break from constantly thinking. It is also a way for your brain to refresh it’s thinking and review what it was doing.

In the end, daydreaming are not always bad and sometimes you need some od your own “brain space” to work things out.

Some people wonder, “What do people mean what Facebook should do?” Don’t worry, I will explain what it means. There was a video of Sinan Aral saying that Facebook and the other social media websites “should lock everything down and make sure everything is secure.” They did that because fake news is being trusted too much. But they then said that if they wanted to change how much people are believing fake news, “They should open the kimono and show us the inner working of how Facebook is working. And if we want to know social media’s affect on society, we need scientists, researchers, and others to have access to this kind of information. So what should Facebook do?

Well, Facebook and the other social media websites probably doesn’t know which one to choose, after all, it is a pretty hard choice. One choice can lead to disaster or might not lead to disaster and the other won’t lead to disaster right away but soon will because people are making tech better and better. “Some people might be scratching your head wondering what does tech have to do with anything?” Well, some people are making new tech that can make fake news, fake images, and fake videos more believable and more realistic or making real news more crazy.

So Facebook and the other social media websites should only let the scientists they want to look at the data and information look at the data and information. They should do that because then, no one else will see the information. “Yes, you might say hackers may get into it.” But hackers can also get into it even if you don’t let anyone look at it and lock it so it’s better to solve it then let it get worse. That is what Facebook and the other social media websites should do.

I’m going to be writing about the article in the New Yorker about Ealter Mitty. So Walter Mitty is a person who daydreams at the worst possible times. Like at first he was daydreaming about being on a ship and sailing on a crew while he was driving, and then, while he was daydreaming he was speeding on the highway. And then after he drops off his wife at the hair thing to get her hair done, he starts daydreaming again! Now he dreams about being the doctor at a place and doing surgery and being popular and stuff. And then he wakes up and almost runs into another car and dies. After that, he starts thinking about what he forgot to buy at the grocery store. Then he starts daydreaming once again, about killing somebody with a gun. And then, he talks to himself about puppy biscuits and gets humiliated by a women who was passing by. After he gets humiliated, he sits in a chair at the hotel and starts daydreaming once again. This time he dreams about flying something in war or something like that. After his wife wakes him up, he walks with his wife out of the hotel. His wife forgot something at the hotel, and then he starts smoking by the drug store and starts daydreaming again. This time about getting executed by a bunch of people. Now, why was he daydreaming? Because his life is boring and his wife sucks. All she does his boss him around and he doesn’t do anything in his life.

A few months ago, when the virus first surfaced, nobody expected it to become so bad, forcing the entire world into lock down. During the pandemic, the U.S has faced a surge in mental health issues among people. But who is most affected? And how can we help them?

In the article, it states that out of 2,032 adults who were interviewed about how many times they had negative feelings over the past month, 28% were likely to screen positive for mental illnesses. That’s almost 8 times as much as 2018’s 3.4%. This shows that the pandemic has caused a very large increase in mental health problems.

As for who is most affected, younger adults and parents have taken the force of most of these issues. This may come as a surprise to some people, as seniors are more prone to the coronavirus, yet they are not facing as many problems. A possible reason why they are not as affected is because they are more protected from the economic troubles during the pandemic. They most likely are retired and safe from money woes. Young adults however, are more likely to lose their jobs at stores and restaurants as they are closing, and may have been in a bad financial space to begin with. Also, young adults already may have problems with their mental health.

Parents are affected because of what you might think. With schools closed, most parents must juggle work with watching and teaching their kids. Also, most of the kids recreational activities have also been closed, leaving kids unoccupied with nothing to do and being bored out of their minds. In 2018, adults with kids were less likely to have mental health issues than those without, but now, parents are more likely to be in distress than the others.

Another example of mental health problems increasing is that calls to mental health hotlines have increased. How we can help does not mean we can open up the country to improve the economy, as that would mean even more cases and deaths, causing even more problems and worries among people going to work about their health and safety. Instead, people should be prepared for a surge of Americans in need of help, so they won’t be overwhelmed if it happens.

In conclusion, lots of people are struggling during the pandemic, and if you are feeling down, know that you are not alone and that there are probably other people out their with way worse problems than you.

Today’s Ted Talk was about how false information on the internet can cause major disruptions in our society. For instance, when some Syrian hackers hacked into verified press and fabricated an extremely surprising story about a bomb hurting the president. This fake news was instantly retweeted about 4,000 times in about 5 minutes. Many major companies were fooled by this tweet and ran their company according to a world in were the president was hurt, which therefore made the stock market crash by almost 139 billion dollars in just a single day.

Because our technology is so advanced, adroit, and enhanced compared to olden days, it is much easier to create photos, videos, tweets, articles, etc that look and sound very authentic. There are many AI automatons and apps who are battling other AI apps who are trying to find the make out if the photo or article is real, or is a concoction of made-up stories. To add on, lots of people are avid social media users, who check social media many times a day. In which spreads the false news and information even faster.

This has been very damaging to the society as from the president example, we can see that the stock market has lost a big fortune. In a foreign country, spreading false information will cause you to become a felon and spent 6 years in prison. Many people do this because they want to cause harm to something or someone, often spreading false stories of them doing horrific things. The other reason is to gain attention and for people to notice them.

In this video, the speaker talked about many ways to stop us from being cajoled into believing the false news. One of the easiest ways is to be vigilant. Another way is to look at other articles about the same situation and see if it is telling the same thing. The last one is to use common sense. There could be small nuances that could just not make sense, or the whole thing could just seem as if the writer is a rudimentary in writing. Whichever way you chose, always be careful about rumors and things on the internet since you never know what’s real or what’s fake.