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NOV 13 – 2018

We did it, y’all! We made it through election season and we all deserve a crisp high-five. We broke midterm voting records!

Huh? What’s that you say? There are still a handful of races undecided? Florida has three contests going to recount?!  You’re right. This will never end.

Take cover from the perpetual politicking and party bickering over at A Beautiful Perspective, where we’ve got a whole new batch of TOUCH Issue stories on the hospital nurses healing with their hands, how ASMR got tied up with sex work and one of our favorite conversation starters: “Would you rather lose your sense of taste or your ability to determine texture?”

On to the news.  

Kevin Ku/Unsplash

Algorithms Unchained

Stop scrolling through whatever “feed” you’re currently skimming and contemplate how much of your life is determined by algorithms.

Algorithms vet job candidates, determine prison sentences, judge screenplays, set insurance premiums, make medical diagnoses, pick the “friends” with whom you stay in contact and even calculate how much coffee is the right amount for each individual. Algorithms are the secret recipes governing how computers make decisions and solve problems, including what search results Google returns and who the IRS audits. Today, there are algorithms in the works that portend to predict crime.

An FDA for Algorithms: But who is watching the algorithms to make sure they’re achieving their purpose and being applied fairly?

Mathematician Hannah Fry, a professor at University College London and author of the book Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms, argues the time has come for algorithms to be more transparent and regulated.

Just as the Food and Drug Administration tests prescription meds for their efficacy and safety, Fry argues there should be a federal agency doing the same for algorithms, which are increasingly entwined with life’s decision-making processes.

“You can harvest any data that you want, on anybody. You can infer any data that you like, and you can use it to manipulate them in any way that you choose,” Fry told National Geographic.  “And you can roll out an algorithm that genuinely makes massive differences to people’s lives, both good and bad, without any checks and balances. To me, that seems completely bonkers.”

Taking back control: As companies and governments gather more personal data and algorithms are increasingly employed in every facet of life, Fry says humans need to work more in concert with their creations and wield more control of how their data is deployed. Otherwise, a computer program could send you to jail or cost you your dream job.

“All these algorithms require huge amounts of data to be able to work,” she told Nautilus. “The question is, who owns your data and are you complicit in giving up your right to that data? I don’t think we’re at the point yet where we know how to navigate these issues, protecting people’s privacy while shooting for a more positive future.”

Algorithms are only as good as the humans running them.

Nati Harnik/AP Photo

Keystone Calamity

The battle over the Keystone XL Pipeline, an oil line that would snake its way from Canada to Nebraska, took another turn late last week when a federal judge halted construction pending further environmental reviews.

Inconvenient Facts: The decision blocks the Trump administration’s approval of the roughly 1,200-mile pipeline, which has been controversial since its proposal in 2008. The project was shelved under the Obama administration due to environmental concerns and protests from Native American groups that the construction plan and pathway violated treaties.

U.S. District Judge Brian Morris ruled the State Department had failed to meet an earlier request for a more thorough environmental review and vacated the permit, ruling that the government failed to offer a “reasoned explanation” for approving the project and “simply discarded” potential impacts on climate change.

"An agency cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past, any more than it can ignore inconvenient facts when it writes on a blank slate," Morris wrote in his 54-page ruling.

The Case for Civil Disobedience: Anti-pipeline activists have developed more sophisticated methods during the decade the Keystone XL has been kicked around. In October 2016 a coordinated team triggered the emergency shut-off valves on pipelines in Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana and Washington, choking off 70 percent of the oil from tar sands that flow into the U.S. from Canada, including those in Alberta where the Keystone XL would terminate. They dubbed the action #ShutItDown, and purposefully got caught in hopes of setting a new legal precedent. It was “the biggest coordinated move on U.S. energy infrastructure ever undertaken by environmental protesters,” according to Reuters.

The Valve Turners’ goal was to get into court, where they used the “necessity defense.” They were acquitted by the judge, but without a jury decision, no legal precedent was set. As nuclear arms protesters argued in the ’60s, the pipeline activists say their actions are civil disobedience meant to prevent a greater threat—climate cataclysm.

What's the true price of a pipeline?

"When the Party's Over" – Billie Eilish

Lean into your seasonal affective disorder with this moody cut from the prolific 16-year-old. 

Vaccination Innovation

The Lowdown got its flu shot, did you?

The season of snot-filled tissues is upon us, and scientists think they have a new weapon against influenza, which killed an estimated 80,000 Americans last year.

Good for more than sweaters: Scientists have developed a new treatment against all types of flu, including new pandemics, using antibodies from llamas.

Ever notice how you need a new flu vaccine each year, but other plagues require only one prick? The flu has always been a tough medical nut to crack because the virus is a master of disguise, mutating its appearance to dodge your immune system. Those mutations are focused at the virus’ surface.

Compared to humans, llamas have minuscule antibodies, the weapons our immune system deploys to combat invaders. They bind to proteins on the surface of a virus and attack. Llama antibodies, thanks to their wee size, can embed themselves deeper in the virus, where mutations do not occur as readily.

The ‘Holy Grail of Influenza’: A team at Scripps Institute in California infected llamas with multiple types of flu, then studied their immune response and picked out the antibodies that proved most effective. They then built a synthetic super antibody combining those elements and tested it on mice.

"It's very effective, there were 60 different viruses that were used in the challenge and only one wasn't neutralized and that's a virus that doesn't infect humans,” Professor Ian Wilson, one of the researchers, told the BBC. "The goal here is to provide something that would work from season to season, and also protect you from possible pandemics should they emerge."

Don’t go skipping your flu shot just yet. The work was published in the journal Science in November, and the team behind it says they are developing the technique further and conducting more experiments before embarking on human trials

"Having a treatment that can work across a range of different strains of virus is highly sought after,” said Professor Jonathan Ball of the University of Nottingham. “It's the Holy Grail of influenza.”

Has long neck, will fight flu.

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  • Hookups are a right swipe away. Kink is kosher. “Anal sex has gone from final taboo to ‘fifth base.’” And yet, young people are having way less sex.
     
  • This Georgia neighborhood tried to divorce its own city due to racism … and the Cheesecake Factory?
     
  • Meet the millionaires using pharmaceutical industry tactics to corner the market on magic mushrooms.
     
  • New York women spend up to $600 more annually on transportation, because men are scary.  

Steven Senne/AP Photo

Time to add a new skill to your LinkedIn page—spliff spinning.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is hiring a pro joint roller, an independent contractor who can manufacture marijuana cigarettes of uniform size and varying THC strengths for research purposes.

The ideal candidate should have the hookup to “acquire hard-to-find controlled and uncontrolled drug compounds” and “must possess extensive experience” in rolling Js.

See, mom, college wasn’t a waste of money after all.

Publisher: Rehan Choudhry
Editor: Tovin Lapan
Backseat Editor: Sarah Feldberg
VP & Executive Producer, Live Events: Lea Jonic
General Manager & Programming Director: Nicole Rudder
Vice President, Marketing: Kastoory Kazi
Video Producer: Serginho Roosblad

Have a question? A story tip? Just want to reach out and say hi? 
Contact us at thelowdown@abeautifulperspective.com 

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