onfocus

Daily Beast
"The comments represent one of the most explicit acknowledgments to date that the White House’s aggressive push to bring students back to campus this fall has created serious risks for increased COVID transmission. It also underscores just how fragile the current situation is at college campuses across the country."
Seems like something they could have predicted. It’s almost like the push to open campuses was motivated by something other than public health concerns.
99% Invisible
"In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville toured the country and was amazed by the postal system. Even in the most isolated parts of the American frontier he found people who had read newspapers and could talk about politics in America and Europe."
Great episode of 99pi about the origins of the postal service and how it promoted infrastructure and literacy.
BuzzFeed News
"The company did not catch the page despite user reports, Zuckerberg said, because the complaints had been sent to content moderation contractors who were not versed in “how certain militias” operate. “On second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that was responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”"
Blaming contractors when that’s the moderation system they designed? They can’t control their own moderation system? Facebook stock price is at an all time high so the company doesn’t have much incentive to change their systems. It’s working well for making money, working terribly for society.
The Verge
"At least two separate Facebook users reported the account for inciting violence prior to the shooting, The Verge has learned. In each case, the group and its counter-protest event were examined by Facebook moderators and found not to be in violation of the platform’s policies."
Facebook increases engagement by recruiting new members to groups like this. This is Facebook working as designed.
Vox
“While I will be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president,” Biden said. “I will work as hard for those who didn’t support me as I will for those who did. That’s the job of a president. To represent all of us, not just our base or our party.”
Competency looks so unusual! But I think I'm ready for it again.
NBC News
“As of this morning, we have tested 954 students and have 177 in isolation and 349 in quarantine, both on and off campus” university officials wrote in a statement. “So far, we have been fortunate that most students who have tested positive have demonstrated mild symptoms.”
Another danger of opening campuses and then abruptly closing them is creating a spreading event. Here's more from The Chronicle of Higher Education: UNC Pulls the Plug on In-Person Fall. Will Other Campuses Follow?
"Students now must pack up and go home. Once there, Joseph Eron, chief of the infectious-diseases division at the UNC School of Medicine, recommended that they quarantine themselves for a time, away from their family members. They should stay in a separate room, wash their hands frequently, and wear a mask around the house. “They should not expose themselves to their parents or their grandparents,” he said. “That’s the way to be completely safe.” After all, they would be returning from something of a coronavirus hotspot."
Cluster, indeed.
popular.info
"There are 44 states that don't require any reason to vote by mail or allow concerns about COVID-19 as a valid reason. All 44 states provide alternatives to the USPS to return your mail-in ballot."
You might want to know how to return a ballot without using the postal service. Just in case it’s needed.

Native Lazy Loading

Hey, did you know that many web browsers have native lazy loading for images now? You can use it by adding an attribute to your image tags:

loading="lazy"

That's it! Instead of loading every image when the page loads the browser will wait until it's needed. Efficient!

Today I added it here and if you scroll very quickly through a page like this with lots of photos, you'll catch them loading as needed.
washingtonpost.com
“Some stories demand collaboration, and this one is a plain example. The nation’s newsrooms — working together and, crucially, with the help of the public in communities around the nation — could find out and explain what is going on, at the macro and micro level,” he said.
Dan Gillmor on how the media should work to ensure the postal service story is told.
Browseulator
Fun experiment: see if loading up Paul Ford's random archive.org ephemera thing gives you the same dopamine hit as the random crap social media gives you to look at. I enjoy it.
Wired
"Here we are, this is August. We are the only country in the world where we waste the most money on tests. Fix the reimbursement."
Gates has a great point here. If companies weren’t reimbursed for tests that take longer than 48 hours to return you’d start seeing results faster than 14 days which is next to useless.
BuzzFeed News
In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.

The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.
Heartening to hear Facebook employees are continuing to speak up and challenge management. If you haven’t seen Max Wang’s departure video, it’s well worth your time: Leaving facebook: a critique of fb's policies, priorities, and ideologies, ft. hannah arendt. It’s a very personal take on the difficult ethical spot the company is putting its employees in.
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