Tomorrow (May 7), the @GburgBookFest is featuring me in an interview conducted by John @scalzi; we pre-recorded the event but I'll be in the live chat for the premiere.
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Scammers recycled covid nose-swabs: Indonesia had 1.6m infections and these supervillains helped export them.
Trump made a lot of terrible senior appointments, but few so bad as @AjitPai, the Verizon lawyer turned FCC Chairman who presided over a grossly, lavishly fraudulent repeal of his predecessor's Net Neutrality order.
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The public comments docket for the 2017 Net Neutrality repeal attracted a record number of responses - 22 million! - and the vast majority of them were obviously fraudulent.
Millions of them were attributed to name/email address pairs from publicly available breach data. Millions more were random strings with followed by "@Pornhub.com." Almost without exception, they supported the telecoms industry's position that Net Neutrality should be killed.
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When schools switched to distance learning amid the lockdown, it represented a chance to rethink education and ed-tech, from lessons to schedules to evaluation.
For the most part, we have squandered that chance, doubling down on the most destructive educational practices.
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This is true across the board, not just in ed-tech. Take the bizarre start-times for classes - as early as 7AM for students enrolled in "period 0" classes. This timing has nothing to do with best practices in pedagogy or our understanding of adolescent brain-development.
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Instead, it's a least-worst option arising from the US's unwillingness to treat high-quality child-care as a public good that benefits both kids and working parents. We open our schools at o-dark-hundred because parents need to get to work.
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Indonesia has experienced one of the worst covid outbreaks in Asia, with 1.6m cases and 46,000 deaths. Early on, the country took prevent measures so travelers wouldn't carry infection domestically and abroad, requiring fliers to get an antigen nasal swab before boarding.
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It turns out that this might have actually led to further spread of the disease, because corrupt employees of the Indonesian pharma giant @KimiaFarmaCare were enriching themselves by REPACKAGING AND REUSING NASAL SWABS.
This coming Friday (May 7), the Gaithersburg Book Festival is featuring me in an interview conducted by John Scalzi; we pre-recorded the event but I'll be in the live chat for the premiere.