Maggie's Farm

What a charming and inspirational message. 

I'm sorry, I was being pretending to be pleasant. As you know, I'm no good at it. Let's start over: Keerist, what drivel. But it's unexceptional drivel. No need to comment on how trite and meaningless the message is. Let's look at the spelling. I guarantee it was written, and shared quite a bit on social media, by college graduates. "You body"? Really? However, I'd like to point out that the word isn't misspelled. It's not a typo, either. The person who wrote it, and apparently a lot of people who read it, are blind to the fact that it's the wrong word. They have a condition I hereby christen Facebook Aphasia. They no longer have the mental ability to tell one word from another. It's not that they don't have the innate intellectual horsepower to learn the difference between you and your and you're. After all, they probably learned Klingon for their cosplay wedding ceremony. They're broken, not dumb.

I think, technically, I'm talking about semantic anomia, but I'm just a blowhard on the Internet, so Facebook Aphasia is good enough for me.

Semantic anomia is a disorder in which the meaning of words becomes lost. In patients with semantic anomia, a naming deficit is accompanied by a recognition deficit. Thus, unlike patients with word selection anomia, patients with semantic anomia are unable to select the correct object from a group of objects, even when provided with the name of the target object.

Of course proper doctor-type persons know you generally need brain damage from a shovel to the parietal or a tumor that makes tempura of your temporal lobe to give you a proper dose of semantic anomia. I hereby posit that a contemporary public school education followed by a trip to the academy is on par with a severe blow to the head. People have become brain damaged by a refusal to enforce abstract standards of right and wrong for grammar, or anything else for that matter. Through a continual process of calling anyone who notices you're in error a Nazi, and exposure to a continuous stream of word salad on electronic devices, there are entire generations who are literally unable to tell one word from another. They've been taught from the cradle to simply take a stab at all things grammatical. They've been conditioned to rely on hunches, and they're blissfully ignorant of where the knee-jerk reactions they call hunches are spawned.

So, welcome to the Facebook Aphasia world, where every voice is passive, every sentence starts with an adverb, and to, too, two is just the sound a Sesame Street train makes. There's no use whining about it, when wining about it works better. And dismember, never leaf anyone who touches your sole more than you body.

On to the links!

Sky Broadband has started blocking porn by default

This means that the first time a user goes to a restricted website, they will be invited to amend the filter settings, or turn it off altogether. However, only the account holder will have the ability to do this - not necessarily a hurdle for families, but potentially a problem in shared houses of adult occupants.

The horror! Pornography will not be immediately displayed by default on your computer screen? What do I need one for, then? And remember, never leave anyone who touches your soul more than his own winkie with safe search turned off

The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a kind of orbiting real estate venture run not by the government, but by private industry.

The White House plans to stop funding the station after 2024, ending direct federal support of the orbiting laboratory. But it does not intend to abandon the orbiting laboratory altogether and is working on a transition plan that could turn the station over to the private sector, according to an internal NASA document obtained by The Washington Post.

Remember kids, Tesla's taxpayer-subsidized piece of automotive space junk is brilliant, and Donald Trump is a doodyhead for wondering if a space station could be useful to anyone. It's just a hunch you have, but you hunches is always wright.

Secret to a Long Life Could Be Revealed in Bat DNA That Doesn't Degrade

Typically, small mammals like mice reproduce fast and die young. The oldest mouse-eared bat ever captured of the Myotis genus was 41 years old, and they regularly live past 20 or 30. While they don't live as long as the average human does, these flying creatures live extremely long considering their size—nearly 10 times longer than an animal of that size would be predicted to live.

I hereby support research that may, one day, after millions in grants, allow humans to live to be 41, too. I sleep by hanging upside down in the closet already, so I've got a head start.

Disappointing findings on Conditional Cash Transfers as a tool to break the poverty cycle in the United States

We chose to highlight this study for two reasons. First, it helps illustrate a pattern that we believe is widely under-appreciated in the policy community: Most programs—even many that are thoughtfully designed and well implemented—are found not to produce the hoped-for effects when rigorously evaluated in well-conducted RCTs. (Randomized Control Trials)

I bet conditional cash transfers break the poverty cycle from the moment the recipients get the dough until the moment their boyfriends make it to the strip joint.

Death by Pokémon GO: The Economic and Human Cost of Using Apps While Driving

Using police accident reports for Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and exploiting the introduction of the augmented reality game Pokémon GO as a natural experiment, we document a disproportionate increase in crashes and associated vehicular damage, injuries, and fatalities in the vicinity of locations where users can play the game while driving. We estimate the incremental county-wide cost of users playing Pokémon GO while driving to be in the range of $5.2 to $25.5 million over the 148 days following the introduction of the game. Extrapolating these estimates to nation-wide levels yields a total ranging from $2.0 to $7.3 billion.

Hmm. Maybe brain damage from Pokemon-induced car crashes is the reason no one can spell "definitely" anymore.

Startup Reflektive Raises $60 Million To Kill The Annual Performance Review

Reflektive encourages customers to use more regular feedback to keep employees improving their efforts more regularly. New areas the company plans to look at include learning, compliance and training. While plenty of startups are tackling those issues on their own, such as Pluralsight in corporate training, Behera says his goal is to create a command center for a manager to see how their employees are performing and adding skills, making companies like Pluralsight more of a potential partner.

I dunno. Screaming, "No raises for anyone, NOW GET BACK TO WORK," always works great for me. I find this saves the employees the embarrassment of hearing how worthless and lazy they are during formal reviews. See, I worry about other people's feelings too much. It's a curse, really.

T.S. Eliot was a terrible hip-hop artist

The poetry world is abuzz this week in the wake of a controversial essay published in PN Review by British poet Rebecca Watts, denigrating a new generation of ‘amateur’ poets. She takes aim at ‘a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their “honesty” and “accessibility” – buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work.’

 In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

California lawmaker wants to stop Facebook from sharing children's information without clear consent from their parents

Assemblyman Ed Chau (D-Monterey Park) says an increasing number of websites and apps are collecting personal information and content from young users that can be used to market brands and products. But the consent agreements that make these practices possible are often buried in general terms and conditions for use of service, and companies often allow minors to sign up with no more than a promise that they have asked their parents for permission.

By definition, a parent who wants their minor child to get a Facebook page is unfit, so wangling clear consent from them shouldn't be too difficult.

I was Mark Zuckerberg's mentor. Today I would tell him: your users are in peril

Thankfully, I am not the only investor demanding Facebook keep users safe. On Monday, two major investors in Apple sent an open letter criticizing the company for not doing enough to protect children from the negative aspects of smartphones and social media. This is a potential game changer. The players are combining two corporate governance strategies in ways that may be harder to resist than traditional strategies.

I thought Mark Zuckerberg's mentor's name was spelled "Beelzebub."

Mountain of sensitive FedEx customer data exposed, possibly for years

The data initially was gathered by Bongo International, a company that helped North American retailers and brands sell online to consumers in other countries, the researchers said. FedEx acquired Bongo International in 2014 and eventually changed its name to FedEx Cross-Border International. FedEx shut down the service last April. The discovery of the customer IDs and other personal information suggests that not only was the information never properly secured to begin with, but FedEx officials failed to purge the data once the service was discontinued.

Yes, I'll be glad to give a screenshot of my driver's license to "Bongo International." Sounds as buttoned-down as the Bank of England.

Everyone have a great Friday. I hope today's links touched your soul more than you body!