Anatomy of a Fake News Headline

How a series of algorithms whiffed and ended up warning Oregonians of an antifa invasion

By Jeremy B. Merrill and Aaron Sankin July 7, 2020 08:00

Sam Morris
THE MARKUP

https://themarkup.org

Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.

As confrontations between Black Lives Matter protesters and police erupted across the country earlier this month, some Oregonians, mostly older people, saw a Facebook ad pushing a headline about how a Republican politician “Wants Martial Law To Control The Obama-Soros Antifa Supersoldiers.”

Needless to say, there was no army of left-wing “supersoldiers” marching across Oregon, nor were former president Barack Obama and billionaire George Soros known to be funding anything antifa-related. And the politician in question didn’t actually say there were “supersoldiers.” The headline, originally from the often-sarcastic, progressive blog Wonkette, was never meant to be taken as straight news.



Original story published by  with tongue-in-cheek headline.

SmartNews ad on Facebook that presents the headline as fact.

The whole thing was a mishap born of the modern news age, in which what headlines you see is decided not by a hard-bitten front-page editor but instead by layers of algorithms designed to pick what’s news and who should be shown it. This system can work fine, but in this instance it fed into a maelstrom of misinformation that was already inspiring some westerners to grab their guns and guard their towns against the largely non-existent threat of out-of-town antifa troublemakers.

This was just one headline that fed into a sense of paranoia reinforced by rumors from many sources. But deconstructing exactly how it came about provides a window into how easy it is for a fringe conspiracy theory to accidentally slip into the ecosystem of mainstream online news.

The trouble started when SmartNews picked up Wonkette’s mocking story. SmartNews is a news aggregation app that brings in users by placing nearly a million dollars worth of ads on Facebook, according to Facebook’s published data. According to the startup’s mission statement, its “algorithms evaluate millions of articles, social signals and human interactions to deliver the top 0.01% of stories that matter most, right now.”

The company, which says that “news should be impartial, trending and trustworthy,” usually picks ordinary local news headlines for its Facebook ads—maybe from your local TV news station. Users who install the app get headlines about their home area and topics of interest, curated by SmartNews’s algorithms. This time, however, the headline was sourced from Wonkette, in a story mocking Jo Rae Perkins, Oregon’s Republican U.S. Senate nominee, who has sparked controversy for her promotion of conspiracy theories.

In early June, as protests against police violence cropped up in rural towns across the country, Perkins recorded a Facebook Live video calling for “hard martial law” to “squash” the “antifa thugs” supposedly visiting various towns in Oregon. She also linked protesters, baselessly, to common right-wing targets: “Many, many people believe that they are being paid for by George Soros,” she said, and “this is the army that Obama put together a few years ago.”

Perkins never said “supersoldier”—the term is apparently a Twitterverse joke, in this case added to its headline by Wonkette to mock Perkins’s apparent fear of protesters. To someone familiar with its deadpan sardonic style, seeing the hyperbolic headline on Wonkette’s website wouldn’t raise an eyebrow—regular readers would know Wonkette was mocking Perkins. But it’s 2020, and even insular blog headlines can travel outside their readers’ RSS feeds and wend their way via social media into precincts where Wonkette isn’t broadly known. SmartNews, when it automatically stripped Wonkette’s headline of its association with Wonkette and presented it neutrally in the ad, epitomized that phenomenon.

Another SmartNews Facebook ad, this one warning Maryland residents about fake news regarding antifa.Source: Facebook Ad Library

SmartNews’s algorithms picked that headline for ads to appear on the Facebook feeds of people in almost every Oregon county, with a banner like “Charles County news” matching the name of the county where the ad was shown. It’s a strategy that the company uses thousands of times a day.

SmartNews vice president Rich Jaroslovsky said that in this case its algorithms did nothing wrong by choosing the tongue-in-cheek headline to show to existing readers. The problem, he says, was that the headline was shown to the wrong people.

SmartNews, he said, focuses “a huge amount of time, effort and talent” on its algorithms for recommending news stories to users of SmartNews’s app. Those algorithms would have aimed the antifa story at “people who presumably have a demonstrated interest in the kind of stuff Wonkette specializes in.” To those readers and in that context, he said, the story wasn’t problematic.

“The problems occurred when it was pulled out of its context and placed in a different one” for Facebook advertising that isn’t aimed by any criterion other than geography. “Obviously, this shouldn’t have happened, and we’re taking a number of steps to make sure we address the problems you pointed out,” Jaroslovsky said.

Jaroslovsky said Wonkette stories wouldn’t be used in ads in the future.

SmartNews targets its ads at people in particular geographic areas—in this case, 32 of Oregon’s 36 counties.

But Facebook had other ideas: Its algorithms chose to show the “antifa supersoldiers” ad overwhelmingly to people over 55 years old, according to Facebook’s published data about ads that it considers political. Undoubtedly, many of those viewers ignored the ad, or weren’t fooled by it, but the demographic Facebook chose is a demographic that a recent New York University study showed tends to share misinformation on social media more frequently.

This choice by Facebook’s algorithms is powerful: An academic paper showed that Facebook evaluates the content of ads and then sometimes steers them disproportionately to users with a particular gender, race, or political view. (The paper didn’t study age.)

Facebook also doesn’t make it possible to know exactly how many people saw SmartNews’s antifa supersoldiers ad. The company’s transparency portal says the ad was shown between 197 and 75,000 times, across about 75 variations (based on Android and iPhone and number of counties). Facebook declined to provide more specific data.

Facebook doesn’t consider the ads to have violated the company’s rules. Ads are reviewed “primarily” by automated mechanisms, Facebook spokesperson Devon Kearns told The Markup, so it’s unlikely that a human being at Facebook saw the ads before they ran. However, “ads that run with satirical headlines that are taken out of context are eligible” to be fact-checked, Kearns said, and ads found to be false are taken down. (Usually, satire and opinion in ads are exempt from being marked as “misinformation” under Facebook’s fact-checking policy, unless they’re presented out of context.)

Wonkette publisher Rebecca Schoenkopf told The Markup she wasn’t aware SmartNews was promoting her site’s content with Facebook ads but wasn’t necessarily against it. In theory, at least, it could have the effect of drawing more readers to her site.

Ironically, she says, Wonkette has a limited Facebook presence. In recent years, the reach of Wonkette’s posts on the platform had dwindled to almost nothing.


The SmartNews ad—inadvertently or not—joined in a chorus of false, misleading and racist posts from white nationalists in response to Black Lives Matter protests.Lindsay Schubiner, Western States Center

Following the chain of information from Perkins’s Facebook video all the way to the SmartNews ad makes it easy to see how a series of actors took the same original piece of content—a video of Perkins espousing conspiracy theories—and amplified it to suit their own motives. Each of those links created a potential for misinformation, where the context necessary for understanding could be stripped away.

Lindsay Schubiner, a program director at the Portland, Ore., based Western States Center, which works to counter far-right extremism in the Pacific Northwest, told The Markup that, while social media has had a democratizing effect on information, it’s also been an ideal format for spreading misinformation.

“The SmartNews ad—inadvertently or not—joined in a chorus of false, misleading and racist posts from white nationalists in response to Black Lives Matter protests,” Schubiner wrote in an email. “Many of these posts traded in anti-semitism, which has long been a go-to response for white nationalists looking to explain their political losses.”

In this case the ad, she said, potentially promulgated the common right-wing trope that Soros, who is Jewish, funds mass protests for left-wing causes.

“These bigoted conspiracy theories have helped fuel a surge in far-right activity and organizing,” she continued. “It’s certainly possible that the ads contributed to far-right organizing in Oregon in response to false rumors about anti-fascist gatherings in small towns.”

Those conspiracy theories have had real-world consequences. Firearm-toting residents in nearby Washington State harassed a multiracial family who were camping in a converted school bus, trapping them with felled trees, apparently mistakenly believing them to be antifa. The family was able to escape only with the help of some local high school students armed with chainsaws to clear their way to freedom.

Jeremy B. Merrill

Investigative Data Reporter


Aaron SankinInvestigative Reporter

Study: More than half of US students experience summer learning losses five years in a row

These students on average lose nearly 40 percent of their school year gains

AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATION

 

Washington, July 9, 2020--Following U.S. students across five summers between grades 1 and 6, a little more than half (52 percent) experienced learning losses in all five summers, according to a large national study published today. Students in this group lost an average of 39 percent of their total school year gains during each summer. The study appeared in American Educational Research Journal, a peer-reviewed publication of the American Educational Research Association.

"Many children in the U.S. have not physically attended a school since early March because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and some have likened the period we're in now to an unusually long summer," said study author Allison Atteberry, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado--Boulder. "Because our results highlight that achievement disparities disproportionately widen during the summer, this is deeply concerning."

"Teachers nationwide are likely wondering how different their classes will be in the coming fall," Atteberry said. "To the extent that student learning loss plays a larger-than-usual role this year, we would anticipate that teachers will encounter even greater variability in students' jumping-off points when they return in fall 2020."

For the study Atteberry and her co-author, Andrew J. McEachin, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, used a database from NWEA, which includes more than 200 million test scores for nearly 18 million students in 7,500 school districts across all 50 states from 2008 through 2016.

The authors found that although some students learn more than others during the school year, most are moving in the same direction­­--that is, making learning gains--while school is in session. The same cannot be said for summers, when more than half of students exhibit learning losses year after year.

Twice as many students exhibit five years of consecutive summer losses--as opposed to no change or gains--as one would expect by chance, according to the authors.

The pattern is so strong that even if all differences in learning rates between students during the school year could be entirely eliminated, students would still end up with very different achievement rates due to the summer period alone.

"Our results highlight that achievement disparities disproportionately widen during summer periods, and presumably the 'longer summer' brought on by Covid-19 would allow this to happen to an even greater extent," said Atteberry. "Summer learning loss is just one example of how the current crisis will likely exacerbate outcome inequality."

Among the students studied, depending on grade, the average student loses between 17 and 28 percent of school-year gains in English language arts during the following summer. In math, the average student loses between 25 and 34 percent of each school-year gain during the following summer.

However Atteberry and McEachin focus their attention not on average patterns of summer learning loss, but rather on the dramatic variability around those means from one student to another.

"For instance in grade 2 math, at the high end of the distribution, students accrue an additional 32 percent of their school-year gains during the following summer," said Atteberry. "At the other end of the distribution, however, students can lose nearly 90 percent of what they have gained in the preceding school year."

"This remarkable variability in summer learning rates appears to be an important contributor to widening achievement disparities during the school-age years," Atteberry said. "Because summer losses tend to accumulate for the same students over time, consecutive losses add up to a sizeable impact on where students end up in the achievement distribution."

Atteberry noted that more research is needed to better understand what accounts for most of the summer variation across students. Prior research, including a 2018 study published in Sociology of Education, has found that race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status predict summer learning but, together, account for only up to 4 percent of the variance in summer learning rates.

Policy leaders across the United States have experimented with different approaches, including extending the school year and running summer bridge programs, to address concerns with summer learning losses. These need to be further assessed for effectiveness, said Atteberry.

Researchers have pointed to gaps in resources such as family income, parental time availability, and parenting skill and expectations as potential drivers of outcome inequality. Many of these resource differences are likely exacerbated by summer break when, for some families, work schedules come into greater conflict with reduced childcare.

"Our results suggest that we should look beyond just schooling solutions to address out-of-school learning disparities," Atteberry said. "Many social policies other than public education touch on these crucial resource inequalities and thus could help reduce summer learning disparities."

###

This study was supported by funding from the Kingsbury Center at the NWEA, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Institute of Education Sciences.

About AERA

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the largest national interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning. Founded in 1916, AERA advances knowledge about education, encourages scholarly inquiry related to education, and promotes the use of research to improve education and serve the public good. Find AERA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

About half of health care workers positive for COVID-19 by serology have no symptoms

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

IMAGE: WESLEY SELF, MD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF EMERGENCY MEDICINE AT VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER AND LEAD INVESTIGATOR FOR THE IVY NETWORK. view more 

CREDIT: VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

The IVY Research Network has completed initial studies evaluating the epidemiology of COVID-19 in health care workers and patients.

Among 249 front-line health care workers who cared for COVID-19 patients during the first month of the pandemic in Tennessee, 8% tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies by serology testing, suggesting they had contracted COVID-19 in the first several weeks of taking care of COVID-19 patients. Among these health care workers with positive serology results, 42% reported no symptoms of a respiratory illness in the prior two months. This suggests that front-line health care workers are at high risk for COVID-19 and that many health care workers with the virus may not have typical symptoms of a respiratory infection. These results were published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases on July 6.

"Our results suggest that screening health care workers for COVID-19 even when they don't have any symptoms could be important to prevent the spread of the virus within hospitals," said Wesley Self, MD, associate professor of Emergency Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and lead investigator for the IVY Network.

Investigator Bo Stubblefield, MD, instructor of Emergency Medicine, added, "We are continuing to study COVID-19 in front-line health care workers across the country to better understand what may be done to decrease their risk of infection, such as using specific types of personal protective equipment."

In a separate study, the IVY investigators studied 350 patients across 11 medical centers in the U.S. who tested positive for COVID-19; 54% of these patients reported no close contact with another person known to have COVID-19 in the two weeks before getting sick.

"With over half of COVID-19 patients not identifying a clear source of their infection, this study reinforces the need for practical measures to reduce the spread of the virus, such as social distancing and the use of face coverings when out in public," Self said.

Additionally, 40% of COVID-19 patients in the study remained symptomatic two weeks after a positive COVID-19 test, showing that patients with COVID-19 tend to remain ill longer than with other respiratory infections, such as influenza. The results were published by the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on June 30.

The IVY Network is a collaborative research group of multiple medical centers in the U.S led by Vanderbilt University Medical Center. It is funded by Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conduct research on severe respiratory infections, including COVID-19 and influenza.

###

Argonne soil carbon research reduces uncertainty in predicting climate change impacts

DOE/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

 

IMAGE: ARGONNE SCIENTISTS WERE AWARDED $8 MILLION FROM ARPA-E TO PARTNER WITH STARTUP COMPANIES AND HELP DEVELOP NEW TYPES OF ADVANCED REACTORS WITH DIGITAL TWIN TECHNOLOGY. FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: EMILY... view more 

CREDIT: ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

DOE and USDA researchers use new global models to study how environmental controllers affect soil organic carbon, changes in which can alter atmospheric carbon concentrations and affect climate. Predictions could benefit industry mitigation plans.

Nature provides a myriad of ways to keep check on its health. One of the more successful indicators is the status of its soil organic carbon, or the concentration of carbon in the organic fraction of soil that consists of decaying vegetation or animal products. A small change in carbon levels can dramatically alter atmospheric carbon concentrations and affect climate.

"Soil organic carbon is important to study because it is the soil property that provides numerous ecosystem services to humanity, such as deactivating pollutants, conserving biodiversity, conserving and purifying water, increasing soil fertility, and mitigating climate change impacts," said Umakant Mishra, a geospatial scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.

"We believe that the scaling functions we developed in this research ... can improve the spatial representation of soil organic carbon in land surface within Earth system models." -- Umakant Mishra, Argonne geospatial scientist

A collaboration between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and several DOE National Labs, including Argonne, set out to predict and model the effect of environmental controllers, or soil-forming factors -- climate, organisms, topography, parent material and time -- on soil organic carbon at different spatial scales across the continental United States.

The results of the soil organic carbon study are intended to reduce uncertainty in predicting global carbon climate feedbacks and associated climate changes. They also could provide more certainty as to how future climate extremes may impact the activities of numerous industries, from agriculture and crop insurance industries to natural resource conservation industries.

Researchers, for the first time, were able to generate scaling algorithms to account for such a large geographic region by using a large set of recently available field observations, a large number of environmental factors and a machine learning algorithm -- an artificial intelligence method that learns from specific data to progressively improve predictions of new, similar data.

In this case, scale refers to the area across which soil organic carbon properties are assumed to be similar, and scaling takes information collected from one spatial scale and applies it to another. With the region broken down into a pattern of grid cells, the spatial scale used in this research ranged from a finer resolution of 100 m to a more course 50 km between grid centers.

"The soil organic carbon content differs in different sampling locations, that's why we need to sample at representative locations if we intend to capture the spatial heterogeneity of soil properties in the study area," Mishra said.

The scaling algorithms that he and his collaborators created as part of the research are important to Earth system models, like the DOE's Energy Exascale Earth System Model, in addition to predicting changes in climate more accurately.

Scaling, Mishra noted, is an issue which has traditionally been ignored in biogeochemical/natural sciences, where it was believed that properties or processes associated with one spatial scale can be applied at both smaller or larger scales. In reality, however this is not the case.

Current Earth system models, which are used to predict the future global carbon climate feedbacks and associated climate changes, operate at coarse spatial scales (50-100 km) and are currently unable to represent environmental controllers and their effect on soil organic carbon in a manner consistent with field observations.

"The control of environmental factors on soil organic carbon is not consistent with the observations in the current land surface models," he added. "We believe that the scaling functions we developed in this research, which are drawn from numerous samples across a large geographical area, can improve the spatial representation of soil organic carbon in land surface within Earth system models."

Among the results of the team's recent work, models showed that topographic and soil attributes were significant controllers of soil organic carbon at finer scales. At the coarser end of the scale, climatic and land use factors served as important controllers.

###

An article on the study, "Importance and strength of environmental controllers of soil organic carbon changes with scale," appears in the October 1, 2020, issue of Geoderma (published online, June 23, 2020).

Funding for this study was provided in part by the DOE's Office of Science.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.

Is COVID-19 widening the gender gap in academic medicine?

Study finds fewer women publishing COVID-related papers, especially in early days of pandemic

MICHIGAN MEDICINE - UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

 

IMAGE: RESHMA JAGSI, M.D., D.PHIL. view more 

CREDIT: MICHIGAN MEDICINE

ANN ARBOR, Michigan -- A new study finds that fewer women were first authors on COVID-19-related research papers published in the first half of this year. The difference was particularly striking during the first two months of the pandemic when schools closed and researchers were told to work remotely.

The findings suggest a worsening gender gap in academic medicine as previous research has shown women are underrepresented among authors of medical research. Other studies have shown female physician-scientists spend more time than their male colleagues on domestic tasks. Women are also more likely to serve on clinical and education tracks that were also upended when the pandemic struck.

"The coronavirus pandemic may be creating even greater challenges than before for women in academic medicine," says study author Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil., director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan. "We suspect school closures, limited child care and work-related service demands might have taken the greatest toll on early career women, especially during the height of the disruptions."

Researchers looked at 1,893 articles related to COVID-19 published between January and June whose first or last author had a U.S. affiliation. They compared that to 85,373 papers published in the same journals in 2019.

They found the share of women first authors dropped 14% for COVID-19 papers compared to papers published in 2019. They found the differences were most striking in March and April to compared to May. Looking only at March and April publications, the share of women first authors was 23% lower than for 2019 papers. Results were published in the journal eLife.

While the study does not assess the reasons for this drop, the authors suggest that during the initial shutdown and strict social distancing guidelines, women likely took on a greater share of child care and other domestic responsibilities, while also juggling major changes to their duties as educators and physicians.

"We know that diverse teams are important for solving complex problems like those related to COVID-19," Jagsi says. "It's critical in this time of crisis that we have policies that support the full inclusion of diverse scholars, including transforming attitudes about domestic expectations for women and resources to support all those balancing great demands both at home and at work."

###

Additional authors: Jens Peter Andersen, Mathias Wullum Nielsen, Nicole L. Simone, Resa E. Lewiss

Funding: None

Disclosure: None

Reference: eLife, DOI: 10.7554/eLife.58807

Resources:

University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center, http://www.rogelcancercenter.org

Michigan Health Lab, http://www.MichiganHealthLab.org

Michigan Medicine Cancer Ans

John Bolton’s Unwitting Usefulness

Mattathias Schwartz 
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS Vol. 42 No. 14 · 16 July 2020

One​ of the enduring mysteries of the relationship between Donald Trump and John Bolton, his third national security adviser, is how the two men ever came to terms in the first place. Bolton, an unreconstructed Cold Warrior, once canvassed for the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater and interned in the Nixon White House. He made his career talking up threats from Iran, North Korea and Venezuela to fill the void left by the Soviet Union. He has consistently urged US policymakers to take the hardest possible line, up to and including military action, even as such interventions have become less and less popular in the aftermath of 9/11. As ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush, he pushed the false claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Cuba was developing biological weapons. In his view, America’s enemies are generally not to be negotiated with. Why trust them?

Trump, though, believes in the magic of negotiation. He sees military and foreign policy through a financial lens. How much are we paying for these alliances, missile batteries, archipelagoes of bases and training exercises? American taxpayers ought to be getting ‘cost plus 50 per cent’, like a general contractor on a real estate project. Of course, the US will never get the best price unless the party on the other side of the table is faced with the prospect that America might stand up and walk away. He is, in other words, an isolationist. In his 2016 campaign he falsely claimed he had opposed the invasion of Iraq, while Hillary Clinton said she regretted having voted for it in the Senate. Bolton, who helped sell the invasion, still stands by it. Where Bolton’s most deep-seated desire is to lay waste to America’s enemies, Trump is absorbed by the prospect of abandoning old friends, or at least extorting them with the threat of abandonment. ‘Ditch the girl before she ditches you’ is Bolton’s gloss on Trump’s philosophy.

In the first pages of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened (Simon and Schuster, £25), Bolton takes pains to lay out how busy he was before joining the Trump administration and how eagerly Trump’s team pursued him. The first jobs he was offered in the administration were not big or important enough: he turned down offers, he says, to be deputy secretary of state, assistant to the president and special envoy to Libya. Bolton started appearing on Fox News to offer hawkish and sympathetic readings of Trump’s foreign policy; Trump gave him Oval Office visiting privileges. By early 2018, Trump was floating the idea of Bolton replacing Rex Tillerson – the former ExxonMobil CEO who inconveniently opposed his opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran – as secretary of state. Worries about whether Bolton’s nomination would make it through the Senate led him to settle on the position of national security adviser, a post that doesn’t require Senate confirmation.

During a normal presidency, the national security adviser serves as the main liaison between the State Department’s diplomats, the military and the White House, weighing their assessments and serving them up as options to the president. This process happens through the National Security Council, a body of hundreds of bureaucrats based a few steps away from the White House. At the beginning of his service, Bolton writes, he sized Trump up as an inexperienced and impulsive administrator who had been poorly served by his ministers. Bolton says he believed that Trump’s paranoid and dogmatic tendencies were not innate, and clung to hopes that the president might reform. ‘I entered, I think, aware of the problems but optimistic that they could be overcome,’ he said in an interview with Stephen Colbert. ‘The book is the story, perhaps, of how I was wrong about that ... I couldn’t believe it was that bad ... I thought it was possible to work with somebody. I thought surely they would want to learn about the complexity of arms control negotiations and that sort of thing.’

Of course, it was that bad. After two years watching from the sidelines as he periodically met with Trump and kibitzed with his associates, it’s hard to see how Bolton couldn’t have known what he was getting into. Of course he wanted to put his personal stamp on US policy, and of course he offers up the self-justifications common among members of Trump’s cabinet, who have claimed at various times that they were working behind the scenes to save the country, or the party, or the presidency, from the president himself. During the first two years of Trump’s presidency a theory did the rounds that he might be restrained by an ‘axis of adults’: Tillerson, as secretary of state; James Mattis, as secretary of defence; and John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff. Bolton wants to place himself outside this particular axis. He blames his colleagues for the administration’s chaotic lack of process, and for engaging in ‘transparently self-serving’ behaviour that only aggravated the rift between Trump and the ‘deep state’ of which he was supposedly now in command.

Bolton agrees with them, however, about the president’s ability, or lack of it. Trump rambles in meetings, overrules and forgets his previous decisions, overestimates his own abilities and can’t maintain focus. In Bolton’s account, the president doesn’t know whether Finland is a ‘satellite’ of Russia, or that Britain possesses nuclear weapons, a blindspot that he was impolitic enough to reveal in front of Theresa May. But complaining about Trump’s ignorance and lack of curiosity is easy: what Bolton and his colleagues fail to do is to measure his strengths. Among them are his mastery of publicity and his ability to exploit the grey space between rules and consequences. Above all, they are blind to the effect that Trump has on them, the force with which he either bends his associates to his will or casts them out entirely. This has been described to me by someone who has experienced it first-hand as a kind of deficiency, an inability to distinguish between disagreement and disloyalty. But I think there is more to it. How do you get someone like William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, to torch their own reputation and suborn themselves to your will? The real question of the relationship between the mad king and his clever, upright ministers is not about the abuse that the ministers suffer, or the justifications they give for sticking it out. It is about how the king manages to wring so much service out of them.

Bolton’s unwitting usefulness to Trump comes through in his retelling of the 2018 Nato summit in Brussels. On the morning of 12 July, Trump arrived late to a meeting that was supposed to be about the admission of Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance. He began to berate Angela Merkel for free-riding on the US. All the Nato allies had committed in principle to budgeting 2 per cent of their respective GDPs for defence; the US was spending 3.6 per cent, and most other Nato members, Germany included, were falling short. At a breakfast the previous day with Nato’s secretary general, Trump had called the status quo ‘very unfair to our country’. In Bolton’s paraphrased recounting, Trump told Nato that ‘the United States was being played’ and that if the 2 per cent target wasn’t reached by the end of the year the US ‘was just going to do its own thing’. Others recall Trump saying that the US might ‘go our own way’. Bolton denies that Trump made an ‘outright threat’ to leave Nato; other participants think he was on the verge of doing exactly that. Bolton remembers the occasion as Trump ‘bargaining in real time with the other leaders, trapped in a room without their prepared scripts’. Trump kissed Merkel on both cheeks, earning himself a ‘standing ovation’, and departed the summit with ‘a publicly united alliance behind him’.

Bolton’s account doesn’t square with the impression Trump made on some of the meeting’s shocked participants. News of Trump’s outburst leaked almost immediately. The New York Times called it a ‘tirade’ and said the gathering ‘generated non-stop images of division’. Trump’s own team was concerned enough to call an impromptu news conference, during which Trump tried to clarify that the US commitment to the alliance remained ‘very strong’. He praised his own performance as a negotiator and returned again and again to the financial commitments he had been able to squeeze out of America’s Nato allies. Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the new secretary of state, stood silently behind him. Perhaps they still thought they were holding Trump back. In the eyes of the world, they were endorsing Trump’s hardball improvisations as official policy. Bolton’s book speeds by the news conference, noting only that Trump ‘gave a positive spin to the day’s events’.

Bolton does manage to chalk up some wins for the interventionist camp. When Trump insists that the US will withdraw all troops from Syria, he gets the president to sign off on a small force remaining: ‘a couple of hundred’, he tells Trump, which – he tells the Pentagon – means four hundred. He persuades Trump to walk away from negotiations with North Korea rather than accept a ‘bad deal’. Thus he carries out his duties as an honest broker while protecting the national interest. But much of his book is taken up with details of how someone in his job juggles calls and meetings with foreign ministers and cabinet members, culminating in the occasional meeting with the president. During Obama’s presidency, most issues were settled inside this official loop. Trump’s ear, by contrast, seems to belong to an informal kitchen cabinet, whose members he consults daily by phone from the White House residence.

One of those with a direct line is Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer. Giuliani does more than act as a presidential courier and unofficial cabinet member: he has also taken paid work from outside clients at the same time, some of whom have actively lobbied federal agencies he has regular dealings with. For a national security adviser, it’s surprising how often Bolton finds himself outside ‘the room where it happened’. Bolton doesn’t go too far out of his way to expose malfeasance in Trump’s kitchen cabinet, but he does drop some interesting clues. He complained about Giuliani’s double-dealing to two White House lawyers, who, he says, agreed that the behaviour was ‘slimy’ but failed to take any action. Elsewhere, he has one of those lawyers agreeing to carry out a command from Trump to assist with the prosecution of reporters for leaks.

Bolton wants to show that Trump is unable to distinguish between his political self-interest and the national interest, and in so doing he lends support to the central allegation in the impeachment proceedings that were finally dismissed earlier this year: Trump did indeed offer Ukraine’s government a quid pro quo – continued US military aid in return for an investigation into the Biden family. Bolton declined to reveal this information during Trump’s impeachment, but claims he would have done so had he been subpoenaed by the Senate. Now, when it may be too late to matter, he goes further, offering other examples of Trump exchanging personal favours with foreign leaders: he promised Erdoğan, Bolton alleges, that he would put a stop to US prosecutors’ case against Halkbank, linked to Erdoğan’s family; he promised Xi Jinping that he would set aside national security concerns about Chinese technology firms while encouraging China to buy more farm products to please Trump’s political base. But Bolton’s indictment of Trump often seems half-hearted. He says he advised John Kelly not to resign until after the mid-term elections, because ‘there’s nothing positive about the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders having more authority.’ Trump may be bad, but Democratic gains would be worse: Bolton seems determined to remain in the good graces of the Republican Party while condemning the sitting Republican president. He toes the party line in insisting that Robert Mueller’s report ‘vindicated’ Trump on the question of whether he colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

By September 2019, Bolton had joined the ranks of ministers whose utility had been exhausted. In Syria and Afghanistan he had managed to temper Trump’s isolationism, but he had little influence on the administration’s larger trajectory. In June this year Trump announced plans to withdraw 9500 troops from Germany, about a quarter of the force stationed there. Nato has made progress on the 2 per cent goal, but such gains must be balanced against the general message conveyed by Trump’s threats to American allies in Europe and Asia, that US support is no longer protected by the established consensus: it is now driven by the whims of domestic politics.

Bolton has experienced the latest wave of Trump’s public incompetence as a commentator. Late last month the Associated Press reported that Bolton had told colleagues he personally briefed Trump on intelligence that the Russian government was paying the Taliban cash bounties to kill American soldiers. Bolton has neither confirmed nor denied that he briefed Trump on the bounties. If he did, it would mean that Trump sat on the information for more than a year. On Twitter, Bolton called the story of the Russian bounty intelligence ‘a serious matter that demands immediate investigation’. As with impeachment, he seemed to be toying with the possibility of striking a decisive blow against Trump, if only a few other Republicans would go first. Don’t hold your breath.

Liquid water is more than just H2O molecules 

SOMEBODY IS PLAYING WITH NUCLEAR PHYSICS 


SKOLKOVO INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (SKOLTECH)


IMAGE: INFRARED SPECTRA OF LIGHT (RED), HEAVY (BLUE), SEMIHEAVY (GRAY) WATER, AND IONIC SPECIES THAT HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED IN THE CURRENT STUDY. RED, WHITE AND BLACK CIRCLES DEPICT OXYGEN, HYDROGEN AND... view more

CREDIT: SKOLTECH

Skoltech scientists in collaboration with researchers from the University of Stuttgart showed that the concentration of short-lived ions (H3O+ and OH-) in pure liquid water is much higher than that assumed to evaluate the pH, hence significantly changing our understanding of the dynamical structure of water.

Figure: infrared spectra of light (red), heavy (blue), semiheavy (gray) water, and ionic species that have been identified in the current study. Red, white and black circles depict oxygen, hydrogen and deuterium atoms, respectively. Arrows show the directions of species vibrational deformation.

Intrinsic ionic species of liquid water play an important role in the redox processes, catalytic reactions and electrochemical systems. A low-barrier tunneling of hydrogen atom between the H2O molecules, caused by nuclear quantum effects, is expected to generate short-lived excess proton states. However, to date, there has been no information on the concentration of such excess protons states in pure water.

Skoltech scientists in collaboration with German researchers measured the ion-molecular composition of liquid water on the sub-picosecond time scale. The result surprised scientists as they observed that up to several percent of H2O molecules were temporarily ionized.

"We used water isotopologues: ordinary (H2O), heavy (D2O), and semi-heavy (HDO) water, to identify excess-proton states. By gradually substituting the hydrogen atoms (H) with deuterium (D), we changed the relative concentration of excess-proton-related species, such as HD2O+, DH2O+, H3O+ and D3O+, and identified their contributions to the cumulative infrared absorption. 

We found concentration-dependent spectral features near molecular bending modes of semi-heavy water spectra that no known model was able to explain. 

We associated these features with excess protons that may be expected to exist on the picosecond time scale," said one of the co-authors, Prof. Henni Ouerdane from the Skoltech Center for Energy Science and Technology (CEST).

"While previous studies of water structure were based on crystallographic experiments, and did not reflect the dynamics of water, our research brings new insights into the intricate water structure at ultra-short time scale. The finding anticipates new effects of electric field interaction with water, as well as other anomalous properties of water," concluded the lead author, Dr. Vasily Artemov, Senior Research Scientist at CEST.

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LIKE 9/11 FIRST RESPONDERS WERE POISONED 

fallout from Notre Dame fire was likely overlooked

A ton of lead dust may have been deposited near the cathedral

EARTH INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

IMAGE: SOIL SAMPLES TAKEN IN THE VICINITY OF NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL SHOW HIGH LEVELS OF LEAD FROM THE 2019 FIRE. AN INTERACTIVE VERSION OF THIS MAP, SHOWING IMAGES OF INDIVIDUAL SAMPLE... view more 

CREDIT: INTERACTIVE MAP BY JEREMY HINSDALE/EARTH INSTITUTE. PHOTOS BY ALEXANDER VAN GEEN.

On April 15, 2019, the world watched helplessly as black and yellow smoke billowed from the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The fire started just below the cathedral's roof and spire, which were covered in 460 tons of lead -- a neurotoxic metal, dangerous especially to children, and the source of the yellow smoke that rose from the fire for hours. The cathedral is being restored, but questions have remained about how much lead the fire emitted into the surrounding neighborhoods, and how much of a threat it posed to the health of people living nearby.

A new study, published today in GeoHealth, used soil samples collected from neighborhoods around the cathedral to estimate local amounts of lead fallout from the fire. Lead levels in the soil samples indicated that nearly a ton of lead dust dropped down within one kilometer (0.6 miles) of the site, and areas downwind of the fire had double the lead levels than sites that were outside the path of the smoke plume. The study concludes that, for a brief time, people residing within a kilometer and downwind of the fire were probably more exposed to lead fallout than measurements by French authorities indicated.

Early evidence suggested that the fire increased lead exposure in Paris. Air quality measurements taken 50 kilometers away from the cathedral found that lead particulates in the air were 20 times higher than usual in the week after the fire. However, a small set of measurements by France's Regional Health Agency, posted weeks after the fire, found that all the samples collected outside of the out-of-bounds area around the cathedral had lead levels below France's limit of 300 milligrams per kilogram of soil. At the time, there were fears that the health agency was underplaying the potential health impacts and not being transparent enough.

"There was a controversy -- were children being exposed or not from this fallout?" said Lex van Geen, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author on the new study. "So I thought, whether I get a 'yes' or a 'no,' it's worth documenting."

In December 2019 and February 2020, van Geen collected 100 soil samples from tree pits, parks and other locations around the cathedral, and in particular to the northwest, where most of the smoke traveled on the day of the fire. When lead enters soil, it tends to stay put, so it can preserve the signal of the fallout for much longer than hard surfaces such as roads and sidewalks, which get swept and flushed by rain.

"It wasn't a particularly glamorous expedition," said van Geen. "I got plenty of strange looks from people wondering why this old guy was scooping up soil, trying to avoid the dog poop, and putting some of the soil in paper bags. But it got done."

Non-contaminated soil would be expected to contain less than less than 100 milligrams of lead per kilogram of soil. However, in samples collected within a kilometer the cathedral's remains, the levels averaged 200 mg/kg. And in the northwest direction downwind of the fire, the lead was significantly higher, averaging nearly 430 mg/kg -- double that of the surrounding area, and surpassing France's 300 mg/kg limit.

A soil-sample site near the cathedral. Paper bag contains the sample

Because the sample sites weren't uniformly distributed, co-authors Yuling Yao and Andrew Gelman from Columbia University's Statistics Department used statistical methods to predict the overall distribution of lead, calculate the averages inside and outside of the plume, and estimate the total amount of lead that fell near the fire. By their calculations, 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) of lead settled within a kilometer of the cathedral. That's six times higher than the current estimate for the amount of lead fallout between 1 and 20 kilometers of the site.

"Our final estimation of the total amount of excess lead is much larger compared with what has been reported earlier by other teams," said Yao. "Of course, we are measuring slightly different things, but ultimately all disagreement in scientific findings shall be validated by more data, especially when they have profound policy and public health consequences. I hope our work sheds some light in that direction."

It is difficult to ascertain how this lead may have affected human health, because too few soil, dust, and blood samples were collected immediately after the fire, said van Geen. The impacts are likely much lower than those of leaded gasoline, which was entirely phased out by the year 2000. Nevertheless, lead could have posed a brief but significant health hazard to children living downwind of the fire.

On June 4, seven weeks after the fire, the French government made blood tests available at a local hospital on an on-demand basis. This only occurred after a child in a nearby apartment was found to have a concerning level of lead in their blood. (Subsequent investigation identified a different source of lead as the more likely culprit in this case.) Soil and dust tests were similarly delayed and limited in scope.

To van Geen, the government showed it had the means to respond but it didn't do so quickly enough. He says that the urgency of the situation should have been more clearly conveyed with pro-active collection and posting of environmental and blood-lead data. This would have induced more parents downwind of the fire to remove indoor dust with wet wipes at home and prevent kids from playing in soil, thereby reducing their chances of exposure.

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The paper, 'Fallout of Lead over Paris from the 2019 Notre-Dame Cathedral Fire,' can be obtained from the authors or news@agu.org

Scientist contact: Alexander van Geen: avangeen@ldeo.columbia.edu

More information: Kevin Krajick, Senior editor, science news, The Earth Institute kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu 212-854-9729

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is Columbia University's home for Earth science research. Its scientists develop fundamental knowledge about the origin, evolution and future of the natural world, from the planet's deepest interior to the outer reaches of its atmosphere, on every continent and in every ocean, providing a rational basis for the difficult choices facing humanity. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu | @LamontEarth

The Earth Institute, Columbia University mobilizes the sciences, education and public policy to achieve a sustainable earth. http://www.earth.columbia.edu.

Sensation seekers, risk-takers who experience more bitterness apt to drink IPAs

PENN STATE

 

IMAGE: A LAGER BEER AND TWO PALE-ALE-STYLE BEERS WERE CHOSEN AS THE TEST STIMULI. THE SPECIFIC BEER SAMPLES WERE SELECTED BY RESEARCH STAFF FOLLOWING BENCHTOP TASTING OF VARIOUS COMMERCIAL PALE-ALE-STYLE BEERS... view more 

CREDIT: MOLLY HIGGINS, PENN STATE

People who seek novel and powerful sensations and are more prone to taking risks -- and who perceive bitter tastes more intensely -- are more likely to prefer bitter, pale-ale-style beers and drink them more often, according to Penn State sensory researchers, who conducted a study that involved blind taste tests and personality assessments.

The results of the study, which involved more than 100 beer consumers, were unexpected, explained researcher John Hayes, associate professor of food science, because previous research typically indicates that greater perceived bitterness leads to decreased intake of bitter foods and drinks.

"Traditionally, most researchers find that people who experience bitterness more intensely avoid bitter food or drink -- so with heightened bitterness, they like it less, and therefore consume it less," he said. "But here, we find that people who seek higher sensations and are more risk-taking, they like bitter beer such as India pale ales, if they also have greater bitter taste perception."

The connection between food liking and personality has been seen before, noted Hayes, director of Penn State's Sensory Evaluation Center. In a study spearheaded by one of his former doctoral students, his research group in the College of Agricultural Sciences found robust links between the liking of spicy foods and the high-sensation-seeking, risk-taking personality traits. Studies done in Mexico and Italy also have revealed similar findings.

These results highlight the importance of considering personality traits such as sensation seeking when considering the relationship between bitterness perception and the liking and intake of bitter food and beverage products, said lead researcher Molly Higgins, who will receive her doctoral degree in food science this August.

"Our data contradict the classic view that bitterness is merely an aversive sensation that limits intake. We found that increased bitterness perception does not always lead to decreased liking and intake -- rather, it's a positive attribute in some products for some consumers."

In Higgins' study, 109 beer consumers rated liking and intensity of two pale ales and a lager, and the intensity of two bitter solutions -- quinine, the compound that makes tonic water bitter, and hops extract Tetralone -- under blind laboratory conditions. Participants also completed intake and personality questionnaires. A liking ratio for each beer was calculated from each participant's liking for that specific beer and their total liking for all beers.

Participants, about half men and half women, most in their 30s, were classified as weekly, monthly or yearly pale-ale consumers using intake data. Using intensity ratings, personality measures and other parameters, the researchers developed models to predict liking ratios and beer-intake frequency.

A lager beer and two pale-ale-style beers were chosen as the test stimuli. The specific beer samples were selected by research staff following benchtop tasting of various commercial pale-ale-style beers sold in Pennsylvania. To represent the range of bitterness in commercial pale ales, researchers selected one pale ale that was strongly bitter and one that was moderately bitter.

To represent a lager-style beer with low bitterness, research staff selected Budweiser. The pale-ale-style beers used in the study were Founder's All-Day IPA Session Ale as the moderately bitter ale, and Troeg's Perpetual IPA Imperial Pale Ale, as the strongly bitter ale.

A significant interaction between sensation seeking and quinine bitterness was found for the liking ratio of the imperial pale ale, Higgins pointed out. But the relationship was not straightforward.

"The interaction revealed liking of the pale ale increased with sensation seeking but only if quinine bitterness was also high," she said. "Intake models showed increased odds of frequent pale-ale intake with greater quinine bitterness and lower liking for lager beer. These data suggest liking and intake of pale ales is positively related to sensation seeking and bitter taste perception."

The findings, recently published in Food Quality and Preference, suggest that further research on the relationship between personality traits and the liking and intake of bitter foods and beverages may lead to new strategies to promote consumption of healthy bitter foods, Higgins contended.

"Avoidance of bitter foods can impact health negatively, because bitter foods such as cruciferous vegetables, green tea and grapefruit contain healthy compounds like flavonols, which are reported to have antioxidant and anticarcinogenic properties," she said.

Alyssa Bakke, staff sensory scientist in food science, also was involved in the research.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative supporte

Pasteurizing breast milk inactivates SARS-CoV-2 

CANADIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION JOURNAL

Pasteurizing breast milk using a common technique inactivates severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) making it safe for use, according to new research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal)

Current advice is for women with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to continue to breastfeed their own infants. In Canada, it is standard care to provide pasteurized breast milk to very-low-birth-weight babies in hospital until their own mother's milk supply is adequate.

"In the event that a woman who is COVID-19-positive donates human milk that contains SARS-CoV-2, whether by transmission through the mammary gland or by contamination through respiratory droplets, skin, breast pumps and milk containers, this method of pasteurization renders milk safe for consumption," writes Dr. Sharon Unger, a neonatologist at Sinai Health and professor at the University of Toronto, who is medical director of the Rogers Hixon Ontario Human Milk Bank, with coauthors.

The Holder method, a technique used to pasteurize milk in all Canadian milk banks (62.5°C for 30 minutes), is effective at neutralizing viruses such as HIV, hepatitis and others that are known to be transmitted through human milk. In this study, researchers spiked human breast milk with a viral load of SARS-CoV-2 and tested samples that either sat at room temperature for 30 minutes or were warmed to 62.5°C for 30 minutes, and then measured for active virus. The virus in the pasteurized milk was inactivated after heating.

More than 650 human breast milk banks around the world use the Holder method to ensure a safe supply of milk for vulnerable infants.

The authors report that the impact of pasteurization on coronaviruses in human milk has not been previously reported in the scientific literature.

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