This is the nine-year-old girl Pearl Johnson. Over the course of four days and three nights in mid-September, she climbed the Triple Direct route on El Capitan, which earned her the title of the youngest person to ascend the 3,000-foot formulation.

Pearl climbed with her mother, Janet, and a family friend, Nick Sullens, of Yosemite Search and Rescue. Pearl’s dad, Philip, a law enforcement ranger in the park, met them at the top. 

“Someone asked me if I was nervous, and I said ‘No,’” Janet said after. “I knew I was comfortable up there. I’ve climbed a lot with Pearl. I knew what she was capable of.”

But the same cannot be said of Pearl. She was nervous as she climbed.

“A lot of time was spent overcoming her fear,” Sullens said. “I was impressed with her wanting to keep going. If it were me at nine, I would have wanted to be out of there. Sometimes she would say, ‘I want this to be over, this is really scary.’ I would offer to bail and be down in two hours, and she would say she wanted to be there. She had a desire to pursue the goal. She wanted to climb that mountain.”

Courageous little girl.

(Image Credit: Janet Johnson)

It didn’t take long for Jessica Zollman to gather a large number of followers on Instagram. Zollman was the fifth employee and the 95th user of the app in 2011, which put her on the ground floor on the tech giant a year after its launch.

A photographer by trade, Zollman, 34, soon found herself swimming in opportunities for commercial work. So she left Instagram in 2013 and joined a photo and advertising agency, where she became a roving photographer shooting on behalf of brands and endorsing products with the occasional #sponsored post.

As an influencer, she states that her newfound fame took her to a “beautiful, mysterious train, making a really, really impressive amount of money”. But this fame wouldn’t last long, and, four years later, she would find herself scrambling financially.

“Market saturation happened,” she says. “People started noticing how lucrative doing that kind of work was, and so there became this new goal of becoming the influencer.” Brands weren’t paying as much because people would work for less – or even for free. “I had to lower my day rate. I had to work twice as hard for twice as less,” she says.

The psychological impact of struggling for work, coupled with the surge of competition, was enough for Zollman to quit the influencer lifestyle and transition back to the polar opposite: a traditional nine-to-five job.

“I just had this moment where I was like: ‘Why am I so ashamed of the idea of having to get a job?’” she says. Relying on Instagram for creative validation and regular income had left her emotionally exhausted, and getting a steady job felt like the best thing for her mental health.

Zollman wasn’t alone in growing disillusioned by the industry’s “song and dance performance.” Experts state that it’s the evidence of change. It is a sort of fatigue that affects not only the influencers, but also brands and the consumers.

See more of this over at BBC.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Jessica Zollman)

You might let out a big sigh when you board your plane and you ended up sitting next to a screaming child, or a man taking off his shoes during the flight. But how would it feel to have a 70-pound pig setting next to you?

This is Hamlet the hog, a pot bellied pig owned by 31-year-old Megan Peabody, who’s based on the U.S Virgin Islands. Hamlet is classified as an emotional support animal, and so Peabody can bring him onboard the plane (at least in the United States) free of charge as aid for her air anxieties.

"His presence is calming because it is familiar to me," Peabody tells CNN Travel. "It distracts me from my surroundings when they make me anxious."

Emotional support animals (ESAs) are an increasingly hot topic in the United States, as more and more passengers arrive at the airport with an animal in tow, arguing that a furry friend will alleviate their aviation anxieties.

The phenomenon's prompted vigorous discussion on what constitutes an ESA, whether the system's being manipulated by pet owners keen to skip travel fees, what the impact is on air crew and fellow passengers, and whether ESAs on the plane do a disservice to those who genuinely need service animals on board.

More details over at CNN.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Megan Peabody)

San Juan Parangaricutiro, Mexico — in this town found in Michoacan state, the heartland of world production of the fruit which locals call “green gold,” small-scale avocado growers guard this treasure of theirs as they arm themselves with AR-15 rifles and take turns manning a vigilante checkpoint. They guard their “green gold” against thieves and drug cartel extortionists.

What’s with their avocados that make it so important? What makes this crop worth fighting for?

Find out the answers over at AP News.

(Image Credit: AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

Two undecided voters, namely, 48-year-old John Zeitler, an attorney from an insurance company, and 36-year-old Hetal Jani, who is running a nonprofit focused on education and mentorship, wanted to know more about Andrew Yang’s “freedom dividend.” Yang is a first-time presidential candidate.

The voters, along with Morning Edition host Noel King, sat down with Yang at a Midtown Manhattan dumpling shop called Baodega as part of Off Script, a series of interviews with 2020 presidential candidates…

Yang, a tech entrepreneur and author, proposes that the government give every American adult $1,000 a month — a form of universal basic income, no strings attached. He says this income is necessary to address wide-scale job losses due to automation. It would help people have the resources to afford to look for work, care for a loved one, start a business or do nonprofit work.

"It's enough to be a game changer," Yang told the voters. "But it's not meant to be a full work replacement, and it's certainly not meant to solve every problem."

Listen to the audio over at NPR.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: A.J. Chavar for NPR)

Humans like songs that are familiar sounding and a little bit unpredictable, according to a new study published in the neuroscience journal JNeurosci. The study suggests that our musical preferences might be grounded in the way we humans learn.

It’s fun to consider what that might sound like.

A Drake take on “Let it Be”? Ed Sheeran snapping out a nice remix of “White Christmas”? A Taylor Swift update of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”?

[...]

The study results correspond with insights into how the brain learns best: challenges and new situations of medium complexity provide the most enrichment with the least frustration.

Find out more details over at Cosmos.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

The global launch of Huawei’s flagship phone, the Mate 30, has been delayed indefinitely thanks to the ban on Huawei from using Google’s services. Inside China, however, the phone has been selling extremely well, as it moved a million units in its first weekend, and reached three million units by the second week.

Those numbers have helped the Chinese tech giant keep up its solid financial figures despite ongoing scrutiny from the U.S. government. In third-quarter financial results released today, Huawei reported total revenue of 610.8 billion yuan ($86.1 billion) and 185 million phones sold, the former a 24.4% over the same nine-month period of 2018, and the latter about on par with last year’s pace.

The company, however, did not specify figures specific to Q3. Instead, it only gave 2019 totals up to September. The special accounting methods suggest that Huawei’s third quarter numbers may have not met the company’s expectations. Ben Sin of Forbes writes:

After doing some math using numbers from Q1 and H1 results, we can deduce that Huawei sold 67 million phones in Q3, which is a jump from Q2’s 59 million. These figures include all Huawei and Honor handsets, so they include budget phones like Honor 9X all the way up to the flagship Mate 30 Pro. But it is likely the Mate 30’s smashing success in China that is driving the bulk of the growth. Huawei declined to break down how much of the 67 million units were sold in China, but if I were to venture a guess, I’d say most, as the lack of Google apps is a major dealbreaker for consumers in Europe, Singapore, and well, everywhere outside of China.

I think it’s still quite a feat for a company to be able to still millions of phones despite the backlash. What do you think?

(Image Credit: EsaRiutta/ Pixabay)

Social networking sites sure have their own domain. Facebook is for those lengthy political rants.Twitter, on the other hand, is for arguments and professional brags. Finally, there is Instagram, for vacation photos.

Instagram stories, however, are a small oasis. While your friends might post their most polished photos or flattering selfies with thoughtful captions to their grids, their stories are a glimpse into their actual everyday: a car they saw with a horrible custom plate, screenshots of a funny text conversation, messy karaoke videos.

The result is a more intimate feel with your friends. Aside from this, by showing you the users who watched your story and giving you the power to block them, Instagram gives you the fantasy that you have some sort of control over your content, and over who makes up your audience.

It’s a fun exercise in narcissism, too; a high-viewer account suggests importance, and it’s easy to convince yourself that views from particular people—a new acquaintance, an ex—mean something.

Jane C. Hu is a small-time Instagrammer. Usually, her stories are viewed by her mother-in-law, her friends, and those she knows from school and work. That changed earlier this year, however.

Strangers were viewing my story. Intrigued, I clicked on each profile to see if we had mutual friends or interests, but mostly we didn’t. It was unclear why an “actor/singer/model” named Jonathan with 5,000 followers would watch videos of my dog, or how a granite countertop company in Marshfield, Massachusetts—a town I’ve never visited—even found my account.

Turns out, the possible culprit for this are bots.

Find out more about this over at Slate.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: ElisaRiva/ Pixabay)

Cloyingly sweet and nutritionally empty. Those are just some words that we can use when describing soda.

Sodas have now become increasingly subject to taxation. This started in 2015 on Berkeley, California. Now, over 35 countries, as well as 7 cities in the U.S., impose a tax on soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages. Several more places are also considering the same thing.

Public health researchers and organizations such as the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics see these taxes as low-hanging fruit in the battle against obesity and the health problems such as diabetes that often come with it. In the United States, nearly 40 percent of adults are obese, which adds $147 billion to the nation’s annual healthcare spending, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The problem is complex, but the widespread consumption of foods packed with added sugars — which add calories but no essential nutrients — plays a major role, and beverages account for nearly half the added sugar in the American diet.

The question is: will taxation work?

Find out more about this topic over at Discover.

(Image Credit: evelynlo/ Pixabay)

Sam Bowman was a computational linguist at New York University. In the fall of 2017, Bowman figured out that computers were not very good at understanding the written word. While they had become competent in showing understanding in certain narrow domains, like automatic translation and determining if a sentence sounds “nice” or “mean”, Bowman was not yet satisfied, and he made a test. He wanted measurable evidence of the genuine article: a genuine, human-style reading comprehension in English.

In an April 2018 paper coauthored with collaborators from the University of Washington and DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company, Bowman introduced a battery of nine reading-comprehension tasks for computers called GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation). The test was designed as “a fairly representative sample of what the research community thought were interesting challenges,” said Bowman, but also “pretty straightforward for humans.” For example, one task asks whether a sentence is true based on information offered in a preceding sentence. If you can tell that “President Trump landed in Iraq for the start of a seven-day visit” implies that “President Trump is on an overseas visit,” you’ve just passed.

The machines bombed. Even state-of-the-art neural networks scored no higher than 69 out of 100 across all nine tasks: a D-plus, in letter grade terms. Bowman and his coauthors weren’t surprised. Neural networks — layers of computational connections built in a crude approximation of how neurons communicate within mammalian brains — had shown promise in the field of “natural language processing” (NLP), but the researchers weren’t convinced that these systems were learning anything substantial about language itself. And GLUE seemed to prove it. “These early results indicate that solving GLUE is beyond the capabilities of current models and methods,” Bowman and his coauthors wrote.

But that was not the end of it. In October 2018, Google introduced a new method which scored a GLUE score of 80.5. It was BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). In just a span of six months, the machines have jumped from a D-plus to a B-minus.

Still, the question lingers: can these machines understand? Or is is just getting better at gaming our systems?

More about this over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Early August 2019. A government over 500 years old assembled to talk about its constitution. The meeting may perhaps be one of the most solemn meetings that ever happened.

The gathering was not held in a glittering, white, neo-classical Capitol propped up by columns crowned with Corinthian ornaments. The proceedings did not take place on a hill, or in a city, or within the boundaries of a capital district. The ceremony did not begin with a thunderous, patriotic anthem. The consti­tution was not read from archival parchment or legislative text. In fact, the constitution was not read at all. The speakers did not stand before a podium in the chambers of Parliament or halls of Congress. They did not prepare soundbites. If you had searched Twitter, you would not have found a single hot take about it. No chanting agitators came to protest. Minutes were not taken. Few beyond the attendees even knew it ­happened. 

But for Julian Brave Noisecat, despite its obscurity, the meeting was a historic milestone. It signalled the return of a good government — an Indigenous government.

See the full story over at The Walrus.

(Image Credit: KAIA’TANÓ:RON DUMOULIN BUSH)

Picture this for a moment. A lone actor in Nigeria deceives women and teenage girls into downloading malware which enables the man to monitor and record their activity. He can use this as blackmail in the future.

The hypothetical scenario written above was given by Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum in their book The Future of Violence.

The real story involved a California man who the FBI eventually caught and sent to prison for six years, but if he had been elsewhere in the world he might have gotten away with it. Many countries, as Wittes and Blum note, “have neither the will nor the means to monitor cybercrime, prosecute offenders, or extradite suspects to the United States.” 

To put it simply, technology allows criminals to target anyone anywhere, and get away from their crime.

More details over at Nautilus.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist/ Pixabay)

At his English boarding school in the 1990s, Christian Jarrett along with his friends would spend hours in roleplaying games. His favorite was Vampire: The Masquerade, and he still remembers how he had a psychological hangover after he spent an afternoon immersed in the character of a merciless, cruel undead villain.

It took a while to shake off the fantasy persona, during which time I had to make a conscious effort to keep my manners and morals in check, so as not to get myself into some realworld trouble.

If immersion in a fantasy character for a few hours can lead to a change in one’s sense of self, “what must it be like for professional actors, and especially so-called method actors, who follow the teachings of the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski and truly embody the parts they play?”

There is certainly anecdotal evidence that actors experience a blending of their real self with their assumed characters. For instance, Benedict Cumberbatch said that, while he enjoyed playing a character as complex as Sherlock Holmes, there is also ‘a kickback. I do get affected by it. There’s a sense of being impatient. My mum says I’m much curter with her when I’m filming Sherlock.’

Mark Seton, a researcher in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, has even coined the provocative term ‘post-dramatic stress disorder’ to describe the sometimes difficult, lasting effects experienced by actors who lose themselves in a role. ‘Actors may often prolong addictive, codependent and, potentially, destructive habits of the characters they have embodied,’ he writes.

Some, however, don’t agree with this kind of view. See more on Aeon.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: BBC/Hartswood Films/ Aeon)

There’s a newly spotted code on a Facebook website, and it suggests that the platform might be preparing to take a leap forward in transparency around how political ads are targeted to its users. Facebook, however, denies this and states that no such change is afoot.

Microtargeting on Facebook allows progressive voting rights groups to show their ads only to racial minorities. Or a pro-nuclear energy group to choose vegans as its target audience. In 2016, Russian operatives attempted to divide the American population by directing Facebook to show racially divisive messages, for instance, only to African-Americans. Such targeting power is built into Facebook’s design. In fact, a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report said Russian meddlers had used the Facebook platform “exactly as it was engineered to be used.”

Yet this information about how each ad is targeted is available only to people who see one and then click on an obscure button. It’s known on the platform as “Why am I seeing this?” or “WAIST,” and Facebook has consistently refused to disclose WAIST info for individual ads to the broader public.

The information, however, appears to be a part of an upcoming redesign of Facebook’s political ad transparency website, at least according to Quartz’s review of the code. But Facebook spokesperson Tom Channik denies this, saying that they are “not considering adding targeting parameters to the ad library at this time.”

But earlier this month, the JavaScript code inside Facebook’s ad library site included several references to a button for WAIST.

Know more about this over at the site.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: ElisaRiva/ Pixabay)

Home to some 180 species is the Paris Zoological Park. Many of these species would fall in the “standard zoo fare” category, like zebras, giraffes, penguins, toucans, turtles, and other common animals you would see in a zoo. This week, however, would be a surprise for everyone, as the Paris Zoological Park unveils a mysterious creature. It’s not a fungi, nor is it an animal.

Physarum polycephalum is a yellow-hued slime mold, a group of organisms that are not, in spite of their name, fungi. Slime molds also aren’t animals, nor are they plants. Experts have classified them as protists, a label applied to “everything we don't really understand,” Chris Reid, a scientist who has studied slime molds, told Ferris Jabr of Scientific American back in 2012.

Like other slime molds, P. polycephalum is a biological conundrum—and a wonder. It’s a single-celled organism with millions of nuclei that creeps along forest floors in search of bacteria, fungal spores and other microbes. It can detect and digest these substances, but it doesn’t have a mouth or stomach. The Paris Zoological Park grew its organism in petri dishes and fed it oatmeal, which it seemed to like, reports CNN's Julie Zaugg. Zoo staff named the creature the “blob” after a 1958 horror B-movie, in which a gloopy alien lifeform descends upon a Pennsylvania town and devours everything in its path.

More details of this blob over at Smithsonian.com.

(Video Credit: CBS News/ YouTube)