Great white sharks are migrating along the NC coast. A marine life expert explains why
2022/12/0
A Great White Shark swims off the shore of Cape Cod, Massachusetts on July 13, 2019. - JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP/TNS
Great white sharks typically gather along the North Carolina coast in the winter but researchers aren’t sure why it happens.
Sara Mirabilio, a fisheries specialist at the North Carolina Sea Grant Extension Program, a state and federally-funded program that “provides research, education and outreach opportunities relating to current issues affecting the North Carolina coast and its communities,” was prompted to research the topic after an angler hooked a “mystery shark” along the coast.
“This juvenile white shark was literally in the surf zone at Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head, that an angler off the pier caught it,” Mirabilio said, adding that the shark was later released.
Research shows that the spot where the shark was caught – and others like it – could serve as a temporary habitat for young great whites.
Why are sharks here?
A recent study shows that shark migration patterns in the winter may have something to do with water temperature.
A research team looking to study the migration patterns of young great white sharks used satellite and acoustic to track them remotely over two winter periods, Mirabilio wrote in a blog post for the N.C. Sea Grant.
The study found that juvenile sharks “were distinctly inhabiting different geographic areas,” where the water was warmer, Mirabilio said.
“A lot of them did come to our coastal continental shelf waters, and those waters are less than 300 feet,” Mirabilio said referring to the younger sharks. “You don’t really get this from adults. Adults are in deeper waters.”
Will the presence of sharks lead to attacks?
Though there have been a handful of unprovoked shark attacks in North Carolina in recent years, the young sharks likely won’t approach swimmers, Mirabilio said.
“These are small sharks,” said Mirabilio. “If anything, they’ll give you a little nip, but I really don’t see these juvenile white sharks posing a threat to humans.”
Did some of our federal police conspire to overthrow the United States?
Thom Hartmann
December 01, 2022
Army Maj. Gen. William Walker, Commanding General of the Washington National Guard, said the Pentagon took three hours and 19 minutes to approve the deployment of the guard when the Capitol was attacked on January 6(AFP)
Congressman Ron Paul’s former staffer, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oathkeepers, was just convicted of seditious conspiracy. But how did he and his merry band get close enough to Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi to present the kind of deadly threat they tried to carry out?
“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” the Scotland Yard police inspector asked Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story The Adventure of Silver Blaze.
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” Holmes replied.
“The dog,” the inspector said, “did nothing in the night-time.”
“That,” replied Holmes, “was the curious incident.”
Why didn’t the “dogs” of our federal police, investigative, and military agencies “bark” when they knew full well in advance that an armed mob was coming to the Capitol to try to overthrow our government, and that many within the mob were armed and willing to kill (and did) to try to accomplish their goal?
Why, afterward, did the Secret Service and the Department of Defense wipe their phones so the data could never be retrieved? Why has there never been a public examination of most of this?
It’s as if a small-town police force was warned that a gang of bank robbers was on their way into town on the following Saturday, and that weekend the entire police force decided to leave their phones off the hook and go fishing. And after the bank was robbed, they all said they didn’t realize they’d really intended to rob the town’s bank. And then destroyed the note warning them the robbers were coming to town.
Why are so few people openly speculating that corrupt individuals — possibly only a tiny handful — within the FBI, Secret Service, and Department of Defense may have participated in a plot led by Donald Trump to overthrow our government?
Is it simply because treason is such an unimaginably heinous act? Does journalistic integrity require them to await “smoking gun” evidence that, at the very least, some people within these organizations were knowing or unknowing participants in Trump’s plot to become America’s last president? Is it fear of losing sources in the agencies?
When I was 13 years old my father gave me a just-published book he’d gotten from a friend in the John Birch Society titled None Dare Call It Treason. It posited that the US State Department was riddled with communist sympathizers, largely based on circumstantial evidence and the “investigations” conducted a decade earlier by Senator Joe McCarthy.
There was no such conspiracy (although there were a few identified as “commies,” mostly just good liberals), but that didn’t stop the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, from frequently and loudly suggesting to the press that there was.
Similarly, from the viewpoint of some of the people working in the FBI and Secret Service on January 6th, it may not have been as absurd as it sounds today to have then believed that Democrats in a half-dozen states had successfully stolen the election from Trump.
After all, the President of the United States was making that claim himself, repeatedly. And dozens of other high-ranking officials, including members of the House and Senate from the various states where the crimes allegedly occurred, were themselves corroborating his claim.
Trump was the boss, and if people in police agencies are anything it’s deferential to the boss. And highly aware of the chain of command. As the old saying goes, if he says, “Jump!” it’s their job to reply, “How high?”
Anybody who’s ever had much contact with members of police and military agencies knows they lean conservative, sometimes to the point of outright support for police-state style fascism. In many instances and circumstances a certain amount of authoritarianism seems necessary to do the job, particularly policing, which is why that kind of work draws authoritarian personalities to it.
It’s also no secret that both police officers and military enlistees vote overwhelmingly Republican, largely for the same reasons (although the GOP also goes out of its way to court those voters).
So, should we be surprised to learn that a handful of members of our federal police agencies — the FBI and Secret Service — and a few most senior officials in the Department of Defense may have conspired — wittingly or unwittingly — with Donald Trump to end democracy in America and institute a Trump-led strongman government?
As the January 6th Select Committee in the House is wrapping up their work and writing their final report, there are more than a few questions around the DOD, FBI, and Secret Service that remain unanswered, particularly about the days and weeks leading up to that fateful day.
The largest question, of course, is why they all stood down, knowing that armed militias were coming to try to overturn an election. And that the militia members were willing to spill blood, which they did, including that of the three police officers killed and over 140 injured, to accomplish their goal.
The attack heading toward the Capitol wasn’t a secret, by any measure. Trump had tweeted an invitation on December 19th saying it would be “wild” and reiterated the invitation multiple times both on Twitter and in other venues.
Rhodes texted to his Oathkeeper members, which included at least one FBI informant:
“We are not getting through this without a civil war. Prepare your mind, body and spirit.”
If that wasn’t clear enough, he also proclaimed:
“We will have to do a bloody, massively bloody revolution against them. That's what's going to have to happen.”
Planning was all over right-wing media, Twitter, and Facebook. People were openly discussing violence and plans for violence. There was brazen talk of revolution, of assassination.
Somebody brought and assembled a gallows on the lawn of the capitol building, but somehow nobody stopped the construction or knows the identities of its builders and how or why it was organized.
And we now know that FBI field offices across the country had noticed the boiling calls for violence, and the Secret Service and DOD were also fully aware of it.
But not only did they do nothing: they actively prevented — for days in advance, and for multiple hours during the active armed assault — any rescue of the small contingent of Capitol Police and legislators left to deal with an armed mob of thousands.
The Commanding General of the National Guard, Gen. William J. Walker, has openly complained that he was prevented — for four hours — from helping the Capitol Police that day. As The Washington Post reported:
“Walker contends that restrictions placed on him by McCarthy and Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, prevented him from sending Guard members to assist sooner.”
How is this an accident?
When Trump took the dais to whip up the crowd before sending them to the Capitol to “hang Mike Pence,” he took the unusual step of speaking from behind a wall of bulletproof glass. Congressman Mo Brooks, among others, wore a bulletproof vest.
They knew what the hell was up.
Hours before Trump’s rally, in the early morning hours, armed people had started showing up near the ellipse; DC police and the Secret Service had reports of an armed person in a tree and others carrying semiautomatic weapons.
January 6th Committee testimony suggests the Secret Service reported this to Trump himself although, weirdly, nobody tried to disarm these people in a city where guns are largely illegal. Instead, apparently there was a debate about whether or not to turn off the metal-detecting magnetometers.
Trump then demanded — in real time, from the stage — that those armed followers be allowed in to hear his speech without having to go through the magnetometers that would have identified their weapons.
Yet somehow his hand-picked FBI Director hadn’t prepared to deal with an armed mob in advance and, on the day of the assault, went fishing or something (his statement to Congress is here).
Whatever he was doing, he was seemingly paralyzed for most of the day and only took direct action, he testified under oath to Congress:
“Beginning on the evening of January 6, the FBI surged substantial resources to help ensure the safety and security of the U.S. Capitol complex, members of Congress, and their staff, and the public.” (emphasis mine)
This isn’t to say I think Chris Wray was in on the conspiracy. Unless he’s managed to drag the agency back to the era of J. Edgar Hoover and is blackmailing politicians, his retention by the Biden administration speaks volumes.
Nonetheless, many of us would like to know, “WTF?!??”
For similarly unknown reasons Trump’s acting Defense Secretary told the National Guard two days earlier, on January 4th, that they were not, without specific permission from him, allowed to help the Capitol police on January 6th. (His memo is reproduced at the end of this article.)
Meanwhile, as convicted seditionist Stewart Rhodes testified at his own trial, Oathkeepers were fully expecting counter-protestors to show up, people they could identify as “Antifa” and attack. General Mike Flynn was pushing Trump to use that expected battle as the excuse to declare martial law and suspend election activity.
And it now looks like Trump may have been prepared to execute Flynn’s plan, had those counter-protestors actually showed up.
The day before, on January 5th, Trump issued an executive order asserting that “Antifa” was both a domestic terrorist and organized crime group and should be treated as such by the federal government.
“[R]eliable reporting,” the January 5th order notes, “suggests that the movement known as Antifa is directly or indirectly responsible for some of the recent lawlessness in our communities, and has exploited tragedies to advance a radical, leftist, anarchist, and often violent agenda. In fact, Antifa has long used otherwise permissible demonstrations to engage in lawless, criminal behavior to further its radical agenda. …
“Those affiliated with Antifa have also repeatedly threatened violence, including against law enforcement officers. …
“In late September of 2020, individuals in a moving truck distributed riot equipment — including shields, masks, and a sign emblazoned with an Antifa symbol — in Louisville, Kentucky, before riots ensued there. Hours later, the violent situation resulted in the shooting of two police officers. And on October 5, 2020, reported Antifa activists in Portland were captured on video attacking a woman carrying an American flag.
“The Department of Justice has already publicly confirmed that actions by Antifa and similar groups meet the standard for domestic terrorism.”
Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.
They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops had previously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests just six months earlier.
The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open. It was discussed on talk radio and podcasts.
This apparently so alarmed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that, on January 4th, he reached out to his boss, Trump’s recently-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, to get permission to send the National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th to prevent the violence they were seeing being planned all over social media.
Acting Defense Secretary Miller, in the effective role of commander of our entire military just one step below Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:*Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.
*Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.
*Not to employ any riot control agents.
*Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.
*Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.
*Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.
*Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.
*Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.
There’s no coherent theory about why Chris Miller wrote this memo and thus blocked the National Guard from protecting the Capitol and the members of Congress within it.
Some have suggested it was to retain an appearance of “normality at the Capitol,” but that makes no sense when you see their response to things like that summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. That was the new normal.
But something wasn’t normal at all in the Trump administration.
Recall, way back on November 9, 2020, right after his election loss was called on November 7th, the Los Angeles Times wrote:
“President Trump’s decision to fire Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Monday [the day before the election] raised concerns that he may be planning far-reaching military moves in his final weeks in office — and is putting in place new leadership more inclined to go along.
“Trump named Christopher Miller, director of the national counterterrorism center, to take over as acting Defense secretary, bypassing the normal practice of having the Pentagon’s No. 2 official take charge temporarily if the top job becomes vacant.”
The article also noted that Miller’s predecessor, who’d been through a Senate confirmation and was a “legal” Secretary of Defense (Miller was not), was concerned:
“In an interview conducted before his dismissal but published after he was fired Monday, Esper suggested that his successor might be more willing than he was to go along with Trump’s questionable uses of the military.
“‘Who’s going to come in behind me?’ Esper told Military Times, which covers the armed forces. ‘It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’ And then God help us.’”
What did it take for Trump to get Chris Miller to write this memo? Was he duped? Was he an enthusiastic or reluctant participant? Did Donald Trump or his Chief of Staff and apparent co-conspirator Mark Meadows dictate it?
If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself — as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence” — Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again begging for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.
Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has been reported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.
It wasn’t until December, 2021 that it was widely reported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, “absolute and unmitigated liars” for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.
Then we discovered that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt, Kash Patel, and Ryan McCarthy were all wiped of all conversations and text messages they had on and in the lead-up to January 6th.
Most of the communication-based evidence was destroyed. Completely destroyed. By coincidence, they said.
Why is it such a stretch to imagine that at least some of these men believed, as Stewart Rhodes has said he believed, that the battle of January 6th would end with Donald Trump declared the president?
That, once declared, he’d award them all presidential medals and give them promotions and positions of even greater power in his second administration?
That 2016 would be the last election actually determined by the people themselves, and they were all okay with that?
Is it simply true that “none dare call it treason?”
Perhaps I’m missing some critical detail that reduces this speculation to nonsense. Or maybe it’s just that because I’m publishing here on Substack in my own little silo I don’t have to answer to a nervous editor who wants to maintain his publication’s access to the FBI, Secret Service, and DOD.
If you know what I’m missing, please let me know in the comments section below.
If not, please join me in asking this simple question:
“Was there a conspiracy — even if it only involved a handful of people — at the highest levels of our government to end the American Experiment that was only defeated by sheer luck? And, if so, who were the conspirators and who were the unwitting dupes?”
Americans deserve to know why the dog didn’t bark on January 6th and in the days leading up to it. And, if appropriate, to dare to call it treason.
US Congress approves bill to avert major freight rail strike
AFP
December 01, 2022
US Senators approved a bill to avert a freight rail strike, but failed to green-light a measure on paid sick days
Washington (AFP) - The US Congress passed legislation Thursday to avert a freight rail strike that could have been devastating for the economy, intervening to break an impasse between workers and management as the holiday season approaches.
The bill, overwhelmingly approved by the Senate Thursday after passing with a bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives a day earlier, effectively forces hold-out unions to accept a deal on higher wages, which a majority of unions already agreed to.
After the 80-15 Senate vote the measure now heads to President Joe Biden for his signature.
Under a 1926 law, Congress is empowered to resolve disputes between railroads and labor unions as part of its power to regulate commerce.
A strike would have seen almost 7,000 freight trains come to a halt, costing more than $2 billion a day, according to the American Association of Railroads.
Around 28 percent of goods transported in the country are by rail, and a large-scale strike would have had repercussions on multiple sectors.
Biden's administration had taken a hands-on approach to the long-running deadlock over a contract between organized labor and railroads, with cabinet secretaries in September taking part in all-night negotiations alongside union leaders and rail executives.
After the lengthy session, leaders from both sides announced a tentative agreement.
But since then, members of eight of the 12 rail unions approved the deal, while four voted it down.
While the House earlier backed a separate measure to add mandated paid sick time to the agreement, addressing a major sticking point identified by unions, this did not pass in the Senate on Thursday.
The Senate also failed to approve an amendment for a cooling-off period between workers and management.
But Biden told reporters Thursday that he "negotiated a contract no one else could negotiate."
"We're going to avoid the rail strike, keep the rails running, keep things moving," he added, at a news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Political risk
The agreement includes a 24 percent pay increase for workers. However, critics in organized labor had slammed a lack of guaranteed paid sick leave, an omission seen as evidence of "unchecked corporate greed," as one leading union put it.
The failure of the agreement to win universal approval among unions had set the stage for a potential strike on December 9, putting the White House in an awkward spot.
Biden has been dubbed "Union Joe" for his strong affinity for organized labor.
The prospect of rail paralysis presented a major political risk for Biden, whose administration is already grappling with decades-high inflation and risks of a slowing economy.
A freight freeze would also have impacted passenger service because some passenger trains run on tracks owned by freight companies.
"I made it really clear. I'm going to continue to fight for paid leave for not only rail workers, but for all American workers," Biden said Thursday.
CANADIAN STUDY
New research finds that atheists are just as healthy as the religious
2022/12/01
Atheists and agnostics tend to be just a healthy and satisfied with life as their religious counterparts, according to new research published in Journal of Religion and Health. The findings cast doubts on the theory that religion and spirituality enhance personal wellbeing.
Study author David Speed sought to test the belief-as-benefit effect, which describes a broad pattern of findings where religious beliefs and behaviors are positively associated with health outcomes. Much of this research has failed to include non-believers.
“There is an enormous literature addressing religion and health, there are literally 10,000s of article connecting belief, religious attendance, prayer, religiosity, etc. with a variety of health outcomes,” explained Speed, an associate professor at the University of New Brunswick. “However, there is a shortage of research addressing atheists, despite this population consisting of millions of Americans and Canadians.”
Speed used data from Canada’s General Social Survey to examine whether religion predicted physical and/or psychological wellness in a representative sample of Canadians. The survey collected data regarding religious identity, religious attendance, prayer frequency, and religiosity (“How important are your religious or spiritual beliefs to the way you live your life?”). The survey also included assessments of self-rated stress, self-rated physical health, life satisfaction, and self-rated mental health.
The sample included 455 atheists, 215 agnostics, 2,080 individuals who identified as “nonreligious,” 6,205 Catholics, 5,685 Protestants, 595 Eastern Religion practitioners, and 430 who identified their religious beliefs as “other.”
After controlling for sex, age, household income, marital status, language, minority status, education level, and geographic region, Speed failed to find any evidence that religious believers had better levels of stress, physical health, life satisfaction or mental health compared to non-believers. Additionally, religious attendance, prayer, and religiosity were generally unrelated to all four outcomes.
“The average person should be skeptical of claims that religion is inherently healthy or inherently health-promoting,” Speed told PsyPost. “While some religious people are undoubtedly healthy, the same can be said of some nonreligious people. Whatever advantages to life religion may (or may not offer), health simply isn’t one of them.”
The findings remained the same even after Speed compared the most nonreligious atheists, agnostics, and “nones” to the most religious Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Religion practitioners, and “other” practitioners.
“I’ve published a fair bit in this field so my findings weren’t particularly surprising to me,” Speed said. “But, my findings do run counter to an enormous literature that extols the health benefits of religion. My research program regularly shows that there are few (if any) health benefits to religion. This may surprise individuals who are only passingly familiar with the field.”
The findings are mostly in line with a previous study, which examined data from more than 15,000 U.S. residents. But as with any study, the new research includes some limitations. Speed noted that the General Social Survey did not collect data on two factors that could have important effects: social support and personality.
“Research addressing religion and health is almost always correlational, this means that we can’t figure out if religion is actually causing health differences,” Speed said. “For my money, I’d wager that the religion-health relationship is an indirect effect of social support or coherency.”
“We need to explore whether nonreligious groups (e.g., atheists, agnostics, Satanists, etc.) are systematically less healthy than the religious – if we can’t find a consistent difference this would suggest the field has deep problems.”
The study was titled: “Throw BABE Out With the Bathwater? Canadian Atheists are No Less Healthy than the Religious“.
How bringing back lost species revives ecosystems
AFP
November 30, 2022
Few species evoke the spirit of the American wild as much as wolves
Washington (AFP) - Scientists often study the grim impacts of losing wildlife to hunting, habitat destruction and climate change. But what happens when endangered animals are brought back from the brink?
Research has shown restoring so-called "keystone" species -- those with an outsized impact on their environment -- is vital for the health of ecosystems, and can come with unexpected benefits for humans.
Here are some notable examples from North America.
Wolves
Few species evoke the American wild as much as wolves.
Though revered by Indigenous communities, European colonists who arrived in the 1600s embarked on widespread extermination campaigns through hunting and trapping.
By the mid-20th century, fewer than a thousand gray wolves were left in the continental United States, down from at least a quarter million before colonization.
Extinction was averted in the 1970s when lawmakers passed the Endangered Species Act, helping revive the apex predator in parts of its former range.
Then, in the mid-1990s, the government took wolves from Canada and reintroduced them to Yellowstone National Park.
This generated a wealth of data that scientists are still working to understand.
The new arrivals kept elk numbers down, preventing them from over-browsing vegetation that provides material for birds to build nests and beavers to build dams -- a phenomenon known as a trophic cascade.
The recovered vegetation helped stop soil erosion into rivers, changing their course by reducing meandering.
While building their dams, the beavers also create deep ponds that juvenile fish and frogs need to survive.
When they embark on hunts, wolves focus on weak and diseased prey, ensuring survival of the fittest.
A recent paper even found that wolves brought back in the midwestern state of Wisconsin kept deer away from roads, reducing collisions with cars.
Amaroq Weiss, a biologist and senior wolf advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity compared ecosystems to tapestries, "and when we take out some of the threads, we weaken that tapestry," she told AFP.
It's thought there are now more than 6,000 gray wolves in the US. The main threat is legalized hunting in some states.
Buffalo
The story of the American buffalo -- also known as bison -- is inextricably linked to the dark history of the early United States.
From an estimated 30 million, their number plummeted to just hundreds by the late 19th century as the US government sought to wipe out plains tribe Indians whose way of life depended on the animal.
"It was an intentional genocide to remove the buffalo, to the remove the Indians and force them onto reservations," Cody Considine of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) told AFP.
Buffalo, he explained, are an integral part of TNC's efforts to re-establish prairies in the Nachusa Grasslands of Illinois.
The buffalo, who were introduced there in 2014 and now number around a hundred, favor eating grass over flowering plants and legumes, which in turn allows a variety of birds, insects and amphibians to flourish.
"Some of these species without that grazing simply just disappear off the landscape due to the high competition of the grasses," added Considine.
As they forage, bisons' hooves kick up and aerate the soil, further aiding in plant growth as well as seed dispersion.
TNC currently manages some 6,500 buffalo, and is creating a pilot program with tribal partners that involves transferring excess animals to Indigenous communities, as part of broader efforts to revive America's national mammal.
Some 20,000 buffalo are now thought to roam in "conservation herds," though none are truly free roaming, added Considine.
Sea otters
As the dominant predator of marine nearshore environments, sea otters play a hugely important role in their ecosystem.
Historically they spanned from Baja California up the West Coast up to Alaska, Russia and northern Japan, but hunting in the 1700s and 1800s decimated their numbers, which were once up to 300,000.
They were thought for a while to have been completely exterminated off California, but a small surviving population of around 50 helped them partially recover to some 3,000 today.
Jess Fujii, sea otter program manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, told AFP that research during the 1970s in the Aleutian Islands showed the otters maintained the balance of kelp forest by keeping a check on the sea urchins that graze on them.
In the last decade, more complex interactions have come to light. These include the downstream benefits of otters for eelgrass habitats in California estuaries.
Here, the sea otters controlled the population of crabs, which meant there were more sea slugs who were able to graze algae, keeping the eelgrass healthy.
Eelgrass is considered a "nursery of the sea" for juvenile fish, and it also reduces erosion, which can factor in coastal floods.
"Kelp and eelgrass are often considered good ways to sequester carbon which can help mitigate the ongoing impacts of climate change," stressed Fujii, a prime example of how destruction of nature can worsen planetary warming.
Folks misunderstand hurricane ‘cone of uncertainty,’ study shows. Time for a change?
2022/11/30
Pedro Portal/El Nuevo Herald/TNS
MIAMI — When there’s a hurricane coming, one iconic image fills TV screens and social media feeds: the cone of uncertainty.
But as shown by the confusion and criticism in the devastating wake of Hurricane Ian, which struck Southwest Florida as a Category 4 in September, that single graphic isn’t great at explaining what’s coming. And that’s largely because the general public doesn’t understand what the cone actually means.
This conversation comes up every year, but as the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season draws to a close, it may finally lead to a real shift.
New research from the University of Miami confirms what a lot of emergency managers already knew, that people don’t understand the cone, and the UM experts are working with the National Hurricane Center to reshape it. Meanwhile, one Miami-based TV station, WSVN Channel 7, has already changed the way it displays the cone for storms, starting with Category 1 Hurricane Nicole in November.
The renewed scrutiny comes exactly two decades after the hurricane center debuted the cone of uncertainty, sometimes called the cone of concern. It’s a simple tool, showing the projected direction of the hurricane’s powerful eye over five days, with the most likely path of the center shown as a thin black line, with a larger shaded area covering areas with a high potential of getting hit by the eye.
The closer a storm gets, the smaller that shaded area becomes. But the width of the cone at each day actually doesn’t change from storm to storm in any given season. There is a reason for that. The cone’s size is determined by error margins from past forecasts — but even then, there is some wiggle room. The formula only predicts a two-thirds likelihood that the storm’s eye will pass somewhere within that shaded area. Thus, the “uncertainty” attached to the forecast maps.
But because scientists have gotten so much better at predicting storms, parts of the cone have shrunk nearly in half in the last decade — from 172 miles at the critical three-day mark to 92 miles. The increasing success of the hurricane center forecasts also have given the public more confidence in the cone, or overconfidence, as Ian showed.
But the bigger problem is that many people in hurricane-prone areas misunderstand that graphic, research shows. A newly published study from UM found that most Floridians surveyed incorrectly believe the shaded area represents places that will be affected by the storm. It doesn’t. The eye is likely to wind up anywhere in that cone and the damage will extend far beyond.
“I think that was the big downfall for this past event with Ian. A lot of the public was focusing just on that one singular line rather than the whole cone of uncertainty,” said Athena Masson, a meteorologist and adjunct professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine. “The public begins to think ‘it’s going to be this tiny little area. Everything outside that is safe.’ That’s wrong.”
What went wrong in Ian
Days before Ian first formed as a tropical depression, the supercomputer-powered weather models forecasters rely on were singing in a chorus. They predicted a strong storm that hooked north through Cuba and approached Florida’s west coast. As it neared the coast, that confidence fell away with a storm on a path that can pose a particular challenge for forecasters and emergency managers.
With storms running perpendicular to the coast like Ian, a small, difficult-to-predict jog this way or that — common with hurricanes — can mean the difference between losing palm fronds and losing roofs.
From five days out, the cone of uncertainty was trained on Southwest Florida. But in those five days the projected center — the dark line at the center of the cone — shifted as far north as the Panhandle before swinging over the next few days back south for an eventual landfall in northern Lee County’s Cayo Costa. The thing is, that barrier island was always within the cone.
For a time, the focus from forecasters and the media was on Tampa Bay, which hasn’t had a direct hit from a hurricane in a century and could face catastrophic storm surge flooding when one eventually hits. Ahead of that risk, Tampa area leaders correctly called for evacuations.
Some counties to the south did not, at least immediately. But as Ian drew closer and models pointed the biggest risks farther south, county emergency managers were forced to make a late call and many residents who based their decision to stay or go on earlier versions of the cone found themselves stuck.
Two days before the storm made landfall, the amount of time it takes for a successful full evacuation of hardest-hit Lee County, the center was pointed well north of Tampa. By the time officials in Lee called mandatory evacuations, residents had just over 24 hours to get out.
More than 100 people would eventually die as a result of the hurricane, many from drowning in Ian’s record-breaking storm surge. It’s impossible to know how many of those residents chose to stay behind because they misunderstood the risk they faced, because emergency officials called evacuations too late or because they simply couldn’t afford to leave.
“We’ve seen this every single year with every single cone — it always shifts,” said Masson. “But when you start losing immense amounts of lives, that really pushes the whole ‘the cone was wrong’ conversation into the spotlight.”
After the storm, residents and elected officials criticized the hurricane center’s forecast. Some leaders, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and FEMA head Deanne Criswell, incorrectly said Lee County wasn’t in the cone days before the storm. The northern half of the county, where the storm made landfall, was always in the cone, but it was on the very southern edge. The worst damage of the storm happened well south of the eye.
Acting NHC Director Jamie Rhome addressed the concerns in a blog post days after the storm had dissipated, saying he was open to changing the cone in the future but he stood by his agency’s forecast.
“I think it’s clear that not everyone is aware of our message to focus on hazards, which usually extend well outside of the cone,” he wrote.
Rhome repeated that the hurricane center has tried to shift the focus in recent years away from the cone and toward the individual risks of an incoming storm — extreme rain, high tides, storm surge, strong winds, mudslides and tornadoes — that vary for different places in the storm’s path.
“All the recent additions to our forecast suite, including new storm surge warnings and maps, were driven by social science to help us communicate hazards — something the cone was never intended to do. The challenge is that not everyone has the time, bandwidth or desire to sift through all this information. The cone is simple and familiar to them, so they make assumptions, oftentimes subconsciously, about what it means,” he wrote.
Is a better cone possible?
While Hurricane Ian was a fresh reminder of the cone’s issues, Hurricane Nicole’s arrival about six weeks later was an opportunity to put those lessons into practice, at least for one TV station.
Miami’s WSVN Channel 7 Chief Meteorologist Phil Ferro said Ian’s “messaging failure” made it clear a change was needed.
“We did not want to see that happen again,” Ferro said.
At WSVN’s North Bay Village station, discussions had already been brewing behind the scenes for about a year on how to best represent a system’s threat to South Florida. After Ian, WSVN’s weather team quickly got to work creating a new forecasting style, one that would put more emphasis on a storm’s hazards.
After all, storms and hurricanes don’t travel in a straight line, they’re more like a “spinning top,” wobbling right and left, said Ferro.
“A straight line is not the best representation of what a storm might do,” Ferro said.
After getting support from the hurricane center, Ferro thought they would roll out the new system for the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season, but then Hurricane Nicole formed in the Atlantic and pointed toward Florida’s east coast.
It was time.
People tuning in to WSVN’s forecast for Nicole still saw the cone of concern and got their forecast for rain, flooding and storm surge.
Gone from the forecast was the straight line representing Nicole’s center inside the cone of concern. In its place: a large shaded area showing the storm’s expected wind impacts, which stretched far outside the cone of concern.
“Hopefully, they’ll have a better grasp of what the threats may be,” Ferro said.
The WSVN team’s decision to switch up its forecasting happened fast, but change at the hurricane center will take much longer, although it’s already in the works.
A team of researchers from UM started studying the cone five years ago. Through online surveys of Floridians and in-person focus groups with Miami residents, they found that though the cone was the most accessed graphic on the hurricane center’s site, less than half of Floridians they talked to knew what it meant.
They also showed Floridians the hurricane center’s latest maps on potential storm impacts, which show how high winds will get and when, which spots are in for flooding rain and where storm surge may strike. Most respondents didn’t understand those graphics either.
“What we heard from folks is that they want to know what should they do, how should they prepare. And they rely on these types of communications to make decisions,” said Scotney Evans, an associate professor of community psychology at the University of Miami and one of the researchers on the team.
“Folks have gotten really used to the weather app experience and being able to locate themselves on the map and see what that means in relation to any type of risk that’s coming,” he said. “They’re always trying to figure out how to make it more proximal to their experience.”
Evans said his team used eye-tracking software to see how respondents looked at the NHC cone, as well as a few other test graphics they made. They also asked focus group members to describe their ideal graphic, which will inform their upcoming work to try and develop a new cone that shows all the potential hazards of the storm.
That may be tricky, said Masson, considering the laundry list of impacts a tropical storm or hurricane can have.
“How is someone going to portray all of that in one image?” she said. “Now, I’m just seeing a collage of rainbows that’s probably going to confuse the public even more.”
In his post-Ian blog post, Rhome alluded to this UM research and said he was open to making any suggested changes, but that it might not happen for a while.
“It’s tempting to want to engineer a quick fix to the cone, but we need to be scientifically disciplined and wait for the body of evidence to come forward, and then determine how to best apply it. We aren’t planning an immediate pivot away from the cone, and I don’t think the cone is ever going to go completely away,” he wrote.
Graphene is a proven supermaterial, but manufacturing the versatile form of carbon at usable scales remains a challenge
The Conversation
November 30, 2022
Graphene (Shutterstock)
“Future chips may be 10 times faster, all thanks to graphene”; “Graphene may be used in COVID-19 detection”; and “Graphene allows batteries to charge 5x faster” – those are just a handful of recent dramatic headlines lauding the possibilities of graphene. Graphene is an incredibly light, strong and durable material made of a single layer of carbon atoms. With these properties, it is no wonder researchers have been studying ways that graphene could advance material science and technology for decades.
I never know what to expect when I tell people I study graphene – some have never heard of it, while others have seen some version of these headlines and inevitably ask, “So what’s the holdup?”
Graphene is a fascinating material, just as the sensational headlines suggest, but it is only just starting to be used in real-world applications. The problem lies not in graphene’s properties, but in the fact that it is still incredibly difficult and expensive to manufacture at commercial scales.
Pure graphene is a uniform, single-atom-thick crystal of carbon arranged in a hexagonal pattern, as seen in this electron microscope image.
What is graphene?
Graphene is most simply defined as a single layer of carbon atoms bonded together in a hexagonal, sheetlike structure. You can think of pure graphene as a one-layer-thick sheet of carbon tissue paper that happens to be the strongest material on Earth.
Graphene usually comes in the form of a powder made of small, individual sheets that are roughly the diameter of a grain of sand. An individual sheet of graphene is 200 times stronger than an equally thin piece of steel. Graphene is also extremely conductive, holds together at up to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (700 C), can withstand acids and is flexible and very lightweight.
Because of these properties, graphene could be extremely useful. The material can be used to create flexible electronics and to purify or desalinate water. And adding just 0.03 ounces (1 gram) of graphene to 11.5 pounds (5 kilograms) of cement increases the strength of the cement by 35%.
As of late 2022, Ford Motor Co., with which I worked as part of my doctoral research, is one of the the only companies to use graphene at industrial scales. Starting in 2018, Ford began making plastic for its vehicles that was 0.5% graphene – increasing the plastic’s strength by 20%.
Researchers made the first piece of graphene by peeling layers of carbon off of graphite – or pencil lead – with tape. Rapid Eye/E+ via Getty Images
How to make a supermaterial
Graphene is produced in two principal ways that can be described as either a top-down or bottom-up process.
The world’s first sheet of graphene was created in 2004 out of graphite. Graphite, commonly known as pencil lead, is composed of millions of graphene sheets stacked on top of one another. Top-down synthesis, also known as graphene exfoliation, works by peeling off the thinnest possible layers of carbon from graphite. Some of the earliest graphene sheets were made by using cellophane tape to peel off layers of carbon from a larger piece of graphite.
The problem is that the molecular forces holding graphene sheets together in graphite are very strong, and it’s hard to pull sheets apart. Because of this, graphene produced using top-down methods is often many layers thick, has holes or deformations, and can contain impurities. Factories can produce a few tons of mechanically or chemically exfoliated graphene per year, and for many applications – like mixing it into plastic – the lower-quality graphene works well.
Graphene flakes made from top-down methods are usually more than one atom thick and have impurities like folds and tears, as seen in this image. Дагесян Саркис Арменакович/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Top-down, exfoliated graphene is far from perfect, and some applications do need that pristine single sheet of carbon.
Bottom-up synthesis builds the carbon sheets one atom at a time over a few hours. This process – called vapor deposition – allows researchers to produce high-quality graphene that is one atom thick and up to 30 inches across. This yields graphene with the best possible mechanical and electrical properties. The problem is that with a bottom-up synthesis, it can take hours to make even 0.00001 gram – not nearly fast enough for any large scale uses like in flexible touch-screen electronics or solar panels, for example.
So what’s the holdup?
Current production methods of graphene, both top-down and bottom-up, are expensive as well as energy and resource intensive, and simply produce too little product, too slowly.
Some companies do manufacture graphene and sell it for US$60,000 to $200,000 per ton. There are a limited number of uses that make sense at these high costs.
While small amounts of top-down or bottom-up graphene can satisfy the needs of researchers, for companies even just the process of prototyping a new material, application or manufacturing process requires many pounds of graphene powder or hundreds of graphene sheets and a lot of time and effort. It took significant investment and more than four years of study, development and optimization before graphene hit the production line at Ford.
Current production can barely cover experimentation, much less widespread use.
Improving manufacturing
For a material that has been around since only 2004, a lot of progress has been made in scaling up the production and implementation of graphene.
There are hints that graphene is starting to break through at a commercial level. There are a huge number of graphene-related startups looking at a wide range of uses ranging from energy storage to composites to nerve stimulation. Major companies – such as Tesla, LG and chemical giant BASF – are also investigating how graphene could be used, in rechargeable batteries, flexible or wearable electronics and next-generation materials.
Graphene is ripe for a breakthrough that will bring down the cost and increase the scale of production, and this is an area of intense academic research. One new technique discovered in 2020, called flash joule heating, is especially promising. Researchers have shown that passing large amounts of electricity through any carbon source reorganizes the carbon-carbon bonds into a graphene structure. Using this process, it is possible to make many pounds of high-quality graphene for a relatively low cost out of any carbon-containing material like coal or even trash. A company called Universal Matter Inc. is already commercializing the process.
Once the cost of graphene comes down, the commercial applications will follow. The appetite for graphene is huge, but it is going to take some time before this material lives up to its potential.
Kevin Wyss, PhD Student in Chemistry, Rice University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Where did the Earth’s oxygen come from? New study hints at an unexpected source
The Conversation
November 29, 2022
Earth (AFP Photo/NASA)
The amount of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere makes it a habitable planet.
Twenty-one per cent of the atmosphere consists of this life-giving element. But in the deep past — as far back as the Neoarchean era 2.8 to 2.5 billion years ago — this oxygen was almost absent.
So, how did Earth’s atmosphere become oxygenated?
Our research, published in Nature Geoscience, adds a tantalizing new possibility: that at least some of the Earth’s early oxygen came from a tectonic source via the movement and destruction of the Earth’s crust.
The Archean Earth
The Archean eon represents one third of our planet’s history, from 2.5 billion years ago to four billion years ago.
This alien Earth was a water-world, covered in green oceans, shrouded in a methane haze and completely lacking multi-cellular life. Another alien aspect of this world was the nature of its tectonic activity.
On modern Earth, the dominant tectonic activity is called plate tectonics, where oceanic crust — the outermost layer of the Earth under the oceans — sinks into the Earth’s mantle (the area between the Earth’s crust and its core) at points of convergence called subduction zones. However, there is considerable debate over whether plate tectonics operated back in the Archean era.
One feature of modern subduction zones is their association with oxidized magmas. These magmas are formed when oxidized sediments and bottom waters — cold, dense water near the ocean floor — are introduced into the Earth’s mantle. This produces magmas with high oxygen and water contents.
Our research aimed to test whether the absence of oxidized materials in Archean bottom waters and sediments could prevent the formation of oxidized magmas. The identification of such magmas in Neoarchean magmatic rocks could provide evidence that subduction and plate tectonics occurred 2.7 billion years ago.
The experiment
We collected samples of 2750- to 2670-million-year-old granitoid rocks from across the Abitibi-Wawa subprovince of the Superior Province — the largest preserved Archean continent stretching over 2000 km from Winnipeg, Manitoba to far-eastern Quebec. This allowed us to investigate the level of oxidation of magmas generated across the Neoarchean era.
The 2750- to 2670-million-year-old granitoid rocks collected from the largest preserved Archean continent may help reveal the origin story of the Earth’s oxygen. (Dylan McKevitt), Author provided
Measuring the oxidation-state of these magmatic rocks — formed through the cooling and crystalization of magma or lava — is challenging. Post-crystallization events may have modified these rocks through later deformation, burial or heating.
So, we decided to look at the mineral apatite which is present in the zircon crystals in these rocks. Zircon crystals can withstand the intense temperatures and pressures of the post-crystallization events. They retain clues about the environments in which they were originally formed and provide precise ages for the rocks themselves.
Small apatite crystals that are less than 30 microns wide — the size of a human skin cell — are trapped in the zircon crystals. They contain sulfur. By measuring the amount of sulfur in apatite, we can establish whether the apatite grew from an oxidized magma.
Map of the Superior Province that stretches from central Manitoba to eastern Quebec in Canada. (Xuyang Meng), Author provided
We were able to successfully measure the oxygen fugacity of the original Archean magma — which is essentially the amount of free oxygen in it — using a specialized technique called X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure Spectroscopy (S-XANES) at the Advanced Photon Source synchrotron at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
Creating oxygen from water?
We found that the magma sulfur content, which was initially around zero, increased to 2000 parts per million around 2705 million years. This indicated the magmas had become more sulfur-rich. Additionally, the predominance of S6+ — a type of sulfer ion — in the apatite suggested that the sulfur was from an oxidized source, matching the data from the host zircon crystals.
These new findings indicate that oxidized magmas did form in the Neoarchean era 2.7 billion years ago. The data show that the lack of dissolved oxygen in the Archean ocean reservoirs did not prevent the formation of sulfur-rich, oxidized magmas in the subduction zones. The oxygen in these magmas must have come from another source, and was ultimately released into the atmosphere during volcanic eruptions.
We found that the occurrence of these oxidized magmas correlates with major gold mineralization events in the Superior Province and Yilgarn Craton (Western Australia), demonstrating a connection between these oxygen-rich sources and global world-class ore deposit formation.
The driving of ocean water deep into the Earth, caused by the sliding of oceanic plates under the Earth’s continental plates, may generate free oxygen as well as the mechanism to release it — volcanoes. (Shutterstock)
The implications of these oxidized magmas go beyond the understanding of early Earth geodynamics. Previously, it was thought unlikely that Archean magmas could be oxidized, when the ocean water and ocean floor rocks or sediments were not.
While the exact mechanism is unclear, the occurrence of these magmas suggests that the process of subduction, where ocean water is taken hundreds of kilometres into our planet, generates free oxygen. This then oxidizes the overlying mantle.
Our study shows that Archean subduction could have been a vital, unforeseen factor in the oxygenation of the Earth, the early whiffs of oxygen 2.7 billion years ago and also the Great Oxidation Event, which marked an increase in atmospheric oxygen by two per cent 2.45 to 2.32 billion years ago.
As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the solar system — past or present — with plate tectonics and active subduction. This suggests that this study could partly explain the lack of oxygen and, ultimately, life on the other rocky planets in the future as well.
David Mole, Postdoctoral fellow, Earth Sciences, Laurentian University; Adam Charles Simon, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Michigan, and Xuyang Meng, Postdoctoral Fellow, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Inside the far-right evolution of Elon Musk
Elon Musk's SpaceX has donated some 25,000 ground terminals to Ukraine for use of its Starlink satellite internet, according to Musk
A new analysis is shedding light on the political devolution of Elon Musk as far-right ideologies threaten to erode Twitter amid the billionaire's takeover of the social media platform
In a piece published by Axios, national security reporter Zachary Basu began with a timeline of Musk's political progression just in the last six months of this year.
"Elon Musk's public musings over the last six months have cemented an unmistakable new reality: The world's richest man, and owner of the de facto public square, has become more and more Republican," Basu began.
READ MORE: 'Sounds just like Trump': Elon Musk blasted for tweeting demonstrably false meme supporting conservatives
While Musk's transformation may not seem pivotal to some, Basu notes that it is important to take the business mogul's voting history into consideration. For decades, Musk has been a supporter of the Democratic Party.
"It's a stunning political transformation for the Obama, Clinton, and Biden-voting CEO of the most successful electric-vehicle company on Earth," Basu pointed out, adding, "And it's one with major real-world implications, given the significant influence Musk now wields in shaping the rules of online public debate."
In another turn of events, Musk also admitted that he would be open to voting for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) if he opted for a presidential bid in 2024.
Despite speculation of Musk switching parties, he has insisted that there is a need for "balance" in politics. According to Basu, Musk has also insisted that he "is 'neither conventionally right nor left' — but he also says the threat to free speech allegedly posed by Democrats has triggered a 'battle for the future of civilization' that trumps all other policy issues."
READ MORE: Early data shows big shifts in followers among Republicans and Democrats weeks after Twitter deal
However, Basu pointed out that Musk has become increasingly critical of Democratic leaders and lawmakers over the last several months. "Musk has frequently trolled Democrats and engaged with right-wing commentators who view him as a like-minded culture warrior," he wrote, citing a recent tweet from Musk.
"The woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide," Musk tweeted last week. "There needs to be a counter-narrative."
But despite Musk's growing support of Republican ideologies, Basu pointed out one potential problem that could arise in the near future: the prospective conflict of interest between Musk's business dealings and his political views.
Basu concluded by writing, "One sleeping giant threatens the Musk-GOP symbiosis: The Tesla CEO has massive business interests in China, a regime viewed by Republicans as the No. 1 geopolitical threat facing the U.S."
Chinese users play cat-and-mouse with censors amid protests
Wed, November 30, 2022
HONG KONG (AP) — Videos of hundreds protesting in Shanghai started to appear on WeChat Saturday night. Showing chants about removing COVID-19 restrictions and demanding freedom, they would only stay up for only minutes before being censored.
Elliot Wang, a 26-year-old in Beijing, was amazed.
“I started refreshing constantly, and saving videos, and taking screenshots of what I could before it got censored,” said Wang, who only agreed to be quoted using his English name, in fear of government retaliation, . “A lot of my friends were sharing the videos of the protests in Shanghai. I shared them too, but they would get taken down quickly.”
That Wang was able to glimpse the extraordinary outpouring of grievances highlights the cat-and-mouse game that goes on between millions of Chinese internet users and the country’s gargantuan censorship machine.
Chinese authorities maintain a tight grip on the country’s internet via a complex, multi-layered censorship operation that blocks access to almost all foreign news and social media, and blocks topics and keywords considered politically sensitive or detrimental to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. Videos of or calls to protest are usually deleted immediately.
But images of protests began to spread on WeChat, a ubiquitous Chinese social networking platform used by over 1 billion, in the wake of a deadly fire in the western city of Urumqi Friday. Many suspected that lockdown measures prevented residents from escaping the flames, something the government denies.
The sheer number of unhappy Chinese users who took to the Chinese internet to express their frustration, together with the methods they used to evade censors led to a brief period of time where government censors were overwhelmed, according to Han Rongbin, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Public and International Affairs department.
“It takes censors some time to study what is happening and to add that to their portfolio in terms of censorship, so it’s a learning process for the government on how to conduct censorship effectively,” said Han.
In 2020, the death from COVID-19 of Li Wenliang, a doctor who was arrested for spreading rumors following an attempt to alert others about a “SARS-like” virus, sparked widespread outrage and an outpouring of anger against the Chinese censorship system. Users posted criticism for hours before censors moved to delete posts.
As censors took down posts related to the fire, Chinese internet users often used humor and metaphor to spread critical messages.
“Chinese netizens have always been very creative because every idea used successfully once will be discovered by censors the next time,” said Liu Lipeng, a censor-turned-critic of China’s censorship practices.
Chinese users started posting images of blank sheets of white paper, said Liu, in a silent reminder of words they weren't allowed to post.
Others posted sarcastic messages like “Good good good sure sure sure right right right yes yes yes,” or used Chinese homonyms to evoke calls for President Xi Jinping to resign, such as “shrimp moss,” which sounds like the words for “step down” as well as “banana peel”, which has the same initials as Chinese President Xi Jinping.
But within days, censors moved to contain images of white paper. They would have used a range of tools, said Chauncey Jung, a policy analyst who previously worked for several Chinese internet companies based in Beijing.
Most content censorship is not done by the state, Jung said, but outsourced to content moderation operations at private social media platforms, who use a mix of human and AI. Some censored posts are not deleted, but may be made visible only to the author, or removed from search results. In some cases, posts with sensitive key phrases may be published after review.
A search on Weibo Thursday for the term “white paper” turned up mostly posts that were critical of the protests, with no images of a single sheet of blank paper, or of people holding white paper at protests.
It's possible to access the global internet from China by using technologies such as virtual private networks that disguise internet traffic, but these systems are illegal and many Chinese internet users access only the domestic internet. Wang does not use a VPN.
“I think I can say for all the mainlanders in my generation that we are really excited,” said Wang. “But we’re also really disappointed because we can’t do anything... They just keep censoring, keep deleting, and even releasing fake accounts to praise the cops.”
But the system works well enough to stop many users from ever seeing them. When protests broke out across China over the weekend, Carmen Ou, who lives in Beijing, initially didn’t notice.
Ou learned of the protests only later, after using a VPN service to access Instagram.
“I tried looking at my feed on WeChat, but there was no mention of any protests,” she said. “If not for a VPN and access to Instagram, I might not have found out that such a monumental event had taken place.”
Han, the international affairs professor, said that censorship “doesn't have to be perfect to be effective”
"Censorship might be functioning to prevent a big enough size of the population from accessing the critical information to be mobilized,” he said.
China’s opaque approach to tamping down the spread of online dissent also makes it difficult to distinguish government campaigns from ordinary spam.
Searching Twitter using the Chinese words for Shanghai or other Chinese cities reveals protest videos, but also also a near-constant flood of new posts showing racy photos of young women. Some researchers proposed that a state-backed campaign could be seeking to drown out news of the protests with “not safe for work” content.
A preliminary analysis by the Stanford Internet Observatory found lots of spam but no “compelling evidence” that it was specifically intended to suppress information or dissent, said Stanford data architect David Thiel.
“I’d be skeptical of anyone claiming clear evidence of government attribution,” Thiel said in an email.
Twitter searches for more specific protest-related terms, such as “Urumqi Middle Road, Shanghai,” produced mainly posts related to the protests.
Israeli data analysis firm Cyabra and another research group that shared analysis with the AP said it was hard to distinguish between a deliberate attempt to drown out protest information sought by the Chinese diaspora and a run-of-the-mill commercial spam campaign.
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. It hasn’t answered media inquiries since billionaire Elon Musk took over the platform in late October and cut back much of its workforce, including many of those tasked with moderating spam and other content. Musk often tweets about how he’s enacting or enforcing new Twitter content rules but hasn’t commented on the recent protests in China.
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AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan in London and AP Technology Writer Matt O'Brien in Providence, Rhode Island contributed to this story.
Zen Soo, The Associated Press
