Some employees of the New York Times have started a tweet revolt at the newspaper’s decision to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), where he asks President Donald Trump to “send in the troops” to combat destruction and looting in cities across the U.S. In public condemnation of their own employer, several employees tweeted in response to the column, “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”
Cotton writes in the column that police forces across the nation are outnumbered with multiple officers having been killed by criminals, and called on the president to invoke the Insurrection Act, pointing to times in the past when commanders in chief have employed the military “to protect law-abiding citizens from disorder.”
The senator argued, “Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protestors. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.” He also mentioned a Morning Consult poll indicating that most of the public agrees with him.
But some NYT employees thought it shouldn’t have been printed. The Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro cited five Times staffers who all tweeted, “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” Shapiro wrote, “Perhaps my favorite thing about the idiotic NYT employees enraged at the paper running an op-ed from a US Senator that happens to reflect the views of 7 in 10 Americans is that they’re doing the stupid ‘repeat this slogan after me’ tactic they learned in college.”
Not all of them used the same line, however. Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted, “I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.” But veteran political analyst Jeff Greenfield (ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS) tweeted on the topic, “If you don’t want an op-ed page that prints views you strongly disagree with, you don’t really want an op-ed page; you want a ‘my-ed’ page.”
Do you think black employees of the NYT will be assaulted because of an op-ed? We want to know what you think!!!!
New Jersey To Teach Climate Change Science in Schools
New Jersey will become the first state to incorporate climate change into the curriculum of kindergartners through high school seniors, state officials announced Wednesday. The new standards, which take effect in September 2021 and 2022, offer a broad outline that will allow school districts to craft instruction based on why the planet is warming and what can be done to mitigate it.
First lady Tammy Murphy lead the charge with the help of 130 educators. Teaching all New Jersey public school students about climate change is especially important in a state that has already felt the effects from sea level rise on the Jersey Shore and in river communities, as well as extreme heat in cities, she said. “This generation of students will feel the effects of climate change more than any other, and it is critical that every student is provided an opportunity to study and understand the climate crisis through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary lens,” Murphy said in a statement.
Gov. Phil Murphy first mentioned the curriculum change during his State of the State address in January and has said it is a cornerstone of his clean energy push. Murphy unveiled in January his much-anticipated outline on reaching 100% clean energy by 2050. But how to achieve those goals will be planned over two years by the Department of Environmental Protection.
The governor has gotten mixed reviews from environmentalists on his clean energy goals, ranging from praise for blocking a proposed natural gas pipeline under Raritan Bay to criticism for allowing NJ Transit to move forward with building a gas-fired power plant in the Meadowlands.
The overwhelming majority of research by scientists and government agencies has shown that the planet is warming in large part due to human activity. According to these scientists, burning such fossil fuels as coal, natural gas and gasoline has increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, preventing heat from escaping into space.
They are going to look really silly when the world doesn’t end and climate reverses on it’s own in 75 years.
Minnesota Based UNH Re-Commits
UnitedHealth Group Inc. said Monday its donating $10 million to address social issues at the root of George Floyd’s death, and to rebuild Twin Cities’ businesses that were destroyed by days of rioting.
Minnetonka, MN based UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) is establishing a dedicated Diverse Scholars trust fund to support Floyd’s children’s education through college. The Diverse Scholars Initiative is a United Health Foundation charity that creates a diverse healthcare workforce, particularly in underserved communities.
“George Floyd’s death is an unspeakable tragedy. Communities all across America are struggling to make sense of what’s happened and how we as a society pull together to move forward, heal, learn and grow,” said UnitedHealth Group CEO David Wichmann. “The 325,000 people of UnitedHealth Group remain steadfast in our commitment to not only build a culture of inclusivity and diversity within our own organization, but to ensure our actions help create a more equitable society for the people we serve.”
United is also donating $5 million and 25,000 volunteer hours to restore numerous minority-owned businesses that were destroyed across the Twin Cities.
The additional $5 million will go towards the YMCA Equity Innovation Center of Excellence in Floyd’s memory. The Innovation Center, a collaborative effort serving the Twin Cities and beyond, is dedicated to advancing equity, inclusivity and systemic change.
“We all have a lot of work ahead of us to address long-standing inequities, and it’s going to take individuals, governments and private enterprises like UnitedHealth Group to achieve our goals of a more inclusive society,” said YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities CEO Glen Gunderson. “We’re grateful for this contribution, which will help us accelerate our efforts to drive positive change in our communities.”
Eye Exam Upgraded by AI
The classic eye exam may be about to get an upgrade. Researchers have developed an online vision test using artificial intelligence (AI) that produces a more accurate diagnoses than the sheet of capital letters we’ve been using. If perfected, the test could also help patients with eye diseases track their vision at home.
The classic eye exam, known as the Snellen chart, has been around since 1862. The farther down the sheet a person can read, the better their vision. The test is quick and easy to administer, but it has problems, says Chris Piech, a computer scientist at Stanford University. Patients start to guess at letters when they become blurry, he says, which means they can get different scores each time they take the test.
Piech is no stranger to the Snellen test. At age 10, doctors diagnosed him with chronic uveitis, an inflammatory eye disease. “I was sitting through all these tests and it was pretty obvious to me that it was terribly inaccurate,” he says. He wanted to find a way to remove human error from the Snellen exam, while improving its accuracy.
So Piech and his colleagues developed an online test. Users first calibrate their screen size by adjusting a box on a web page to the size of a credit card. After entering the distance they are from the screen, the test displays an “E” in one of four orientations. Based on the answer, the algorithm then uses statistics to make a prediction for a vision score. As the test goes on, the algorithm is able to make a more accurate prediction about the score. The test asks 20 questions per eye and takes a couple minutes to complete.
When the researchers ran their “Stanford acuity test” (StAT) through 1000 computer simulations mimicking real patients, the diagnostic reduced error by 74% compared with the Snellen test, the team reports this month in the Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The simulations work by starting with a known score and factors in the types of mistakes a human might make.
Whether the StAT test will actually replace the Snellen chart is up for debate. “It’s definitely helpful,” says Mark Blecher, an ophthalmologist in Philadelphia. Blecher says getting all eye care professionals to agree on a new standard would be “daunting at best” because the status quo can be hard to overcome.
Martians Had Gunpowder and Bullets (eyeroll)
This one is completely insane. Alien hunters claim to have discovered evidence of an ancient war on Mars after finding what they believe to be a discarded bullet.
Extraterrestrials once resided on Mars but went extinct after a planet-wide war, according to a bizarre new claim. Conspiracy theorists are shockingly claiming that a thin rock discovered in NASA images is actually an ancient bullet. The claimants argue not only is this evidence of past life on the Red Planet but also that the beings there were involved in war.
The shock claim was made by prominent UFO enthusiast Scott C Waring, who said Martians destroyed themselves. Taking to his ET Database blog, Mr Waring said: “What I found was something I didn’t want to find – a bullet.
“This tiny projectile is longer than most bullets but does appear to still be unused. I see the head of the bullet which looks like is make [sic] from a copper alloy. “The lower part of the projectile is the the case which is quite long. The longer case means it could hold more gunpowder to propel the bullet further.
“The back part of the bullet has a square area which may have made each bullet manually loaded into the gun one at time, meaning the gun held only one shot at a time.
“It may be a sign of a great battle taking place long ago. A battle that very well may have destroyed Mars itself.”
However, sceptics and NASA would say the bullet as other similar findings are just the effects of pareidolia – a psychological phenomenon when the brain tricks the eyes into seeing familiar objects or shapes in patterns or textures such as a rock surface.
But this is not the first time someone has said there was a huge war on Mars. A user on Reddit posted his theory on the social media site, which claims Martians were forced to flee their planet when disaster struck. As a result, the aliens created our Moon as a new base as to rescue as many of the population as possible. The Redditer, Brarticus, wrote: “I think the Moon is not only an artificial structure.
“I think Mars was home to intelligent life and they faced a catastrophic planetary event and our Moon was created to rescue as much of their population as possible. “It was manufactured as an Ark by ‘Martians’ in the very, very distant past. “Look at the surface of Mars – it’s obvious something catastrophic occurred.”