Greenwash and Greenwashing: A look at the claims of government and big business showing how they manipulate the truth and mislead us with false and unverifiable claims.

Today, March 11, 2022, marks two years since covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. We've had lockdowns, vaccines, and arguments about how to move forward and live with this virus. We've watched the pandemic through numbers and data and memorials to the many lives lost, officially now over six million. It is likely this figure is a vast undercount. A study published in The Lancet this week estimated that the true number may be three times higher, at 18.2 million.

How anti-science movements use the language of personal liberty and how we can address it. Looking back, the initial spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 illustrates that clinicians, epidemiologists and behavioral scientists around the world greatly underestimated the scope and intensity of resistance to mitigation measures that would follow. Many in the medical community have remained wedded to the view that direct observation of the soaring volume of death and morbidity associated with coronavirus infections will convert most people into adherents of mitigation measures. Hence, most public health communications on mask-wearing, social distancing, and vaccination stubbornly focus on and attempt to leverage efficacy data, patient testimonies, and the clout of clinicians, politicians, athletes and social media influencers, to increase public uptake.

Freedoms are most intimately and persistently felt as, and equated with, human rights. However, without strategic integration, freedom becomes an individualistic paradigm focused on personal gain, disengaged from collectivist public health efforts. The embrace of mitigation should be promoted as an expression of freedom and support of human rights, a communal paradigm focused on maintaining personal health and dignity.

The United Nations confirmed that privacy remains a human right in the digital age, but our daily digital experiences and seemingly ever-increasing amounts of data suggest that privacy is a mundane, distributed and technologically mediated concept. This article explores privacy by mapping out different legal and conceptual approaches to privacy protection in the context of datafication.

This report unpacks and looks at the human consequences of these governance flaws, from speed and access to security and privacy of online information. It details how these flaws especially impact those who are already subject to surveillance or structural inequities, such as an activist texting meeting times on WhatsApp, or a low-income senior looking for a vaccine appointment. Crucially, the report offers recommendations to civil society, corporations, governments, and academics on how to align internet governance with the public interest, including calling on governance organizations to employ human rights impact assessments into the evaluations of norms and standards.

In recent months, you may have come across a phrase growing in popularity: Web3. You might be wondering what it is, what it will mean for the future, and how exactly the third-generation internet differs from the first two. At its core is the idea of decentralization, which we've seen with cryptocurrencies. Rather than Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook (sorry, Meta) hoarding everything, the internet will supposedly become more democratized.

Time magazine has named CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk as Person of the Year: "In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world's richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society."

Inequality has remained persistently high for decades, and a new report shows just how stark the divide is between the richest and poorest people on the planet. The 2022 World Inequality Report was the product of four years of research and produced an unprecedented data set on just how wealth is distributed. The data serves as a complete rebuke of the trickle-down economic theory, which posits that cutting taxes on the rich will "trickle down" to those below, with the cuts eventually benefiting everyone.

Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. B Corps are accelerating a global culture shift to redefine success in business and build a more inclusive and sustainable economy.

Investment in transportation, agriculture, healthcare, and education should take priority over investment in surveillance technologies.

Under Taliban rule, citizens worry that digital connections to Western organizations could be used against them.

Blockchain technology, like many tech developments, was born out of a utopian ideal. It came from a vision for a cashless society that maximized individual autonomy with freedom from oversight and taxation. However, the potential for blockchain to fetter us to a system using our records is innate to a tamper-resistant, extremely durable, and verifiable record. Here, we adopt a contrarian viewpoint and discuss the drawbacks of blockchain technology that come from its strengths rather than its weaknesses. The concern with the scenarios we outline is not that it will come true but that it can.

Interesting report on data stewardship, tells me that stewardship concepts should be part of a (not just technology-focused) data literacy approach.

A user wrote:

"Twitter did something that I would not have thought possible: It stole reading from me," argues a former New Yorker writer (who was once nominated for the Pulitzer Prize). In a new piece in the Atlantic this week, they argue that Twitter "hacked itself so deep into my circuitry that it interrupted the very formation of my thoughts..."

I'm still haunted by a free 37-minute documentary I saw two years ago on YouTube called Bookstores: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content. It followed Max Joseph, the former host of the TV show Catfish (and the documentary's director) as he spoke to several reading experts (including a speed reader) about how he could form better habits. But at one point he calculates he was spending 20 minutes a day just on news, plus another 30 minutes a day on social media — which adds up to 304 hours a year that could've been spent reading books. (Enough time to read 30 books a year.)

Are we reading fewer books because of social media?

Smartphones, sensors and consumer habits reveal much about society. Too few people have a say in how these data are created and used.

It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has "billions of books and no central filing system." Imagine if libraries didn't exist and there was only a "sharing economy" for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It's no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be -- especially if someone reported a book being in someone else's home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That's what we have right now on the web.