Interesting Links: May 1, 2019

Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.

Straight from my RSS feed:

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Ten links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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1. Hurricane Michael unearths hidden history at 'Negro Fort' where 270 escaped slaves died - Fort Gadsden, overlooking the Appalachia River in Florida, was built by the British during the war of 1812. It housed 270 freed slaves who had joined the British Army in exchange for freedom, until American forces exploded the armory, killing most of the residents. The fort was managed by the National Park Service starting in the 1940s, but was not excavated because it was a historical landmark. When Hurricane Michael tore down some trees, it revealed some places where archaeologists can now explore for artifacts. Thus far, they have found Seminole and British artifacts, a field oven, and a circular ditch that served as a fire pit. The site has also been entered into the national database of Underground Railroad sites, and Archaeologists are combing through census records trying to identify the former slaves who were killed in the explosion. h/t archaeology.org


2. AT&T and Verizon hit record low smartphone upgrade rates last quarter - As prices rise and the technology differences between smartphone generations shrink, consumers are holding on to their phones for longer, which is slowing sales for the carriers.


3. Dark Matter Gets a Reprieve in New Analysis - In an effort to account for light emanating from a strange glow in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy that was first detected in 2009, there are two competing explanations, dark matter and millisecond pulsars. Pulsars have been the leading theory since a 2015 study, but a new ArXiv paper suggests that existing methods are tuned to find pulsars and miss dark matter, so earlier studies may have been flawed. Meanwhile, two March pre-prints found evidence to support the dark matter explanation.


4. Louis Armstrong Personified the American Dream - This article, which was reposted for International Jazz Day on April 30, describes how Armstrong earned admiration around the globe and from people of all races by applying his personal doctrine of hard work and self-reliance.


5. U.S. Airports Will Use AI To Scan 97% Of Passengers' Faces Within 4 Years - According to the US Department of Homeland Security, customs is going to dramatically expand its Biometric Exit program to scan 97% of all passengers. Current systems can only look up photos from passenger systems, but new ones will have access to millions of visa and passport photos. As we might expect, immigration hawks support the system and civil libertarians express concerns. At present, scanned images are encrypted, and the customs agency says they are only retained for a short time. h/t Communications of the ACM


6. Forget about artificial intelligence, extended intelligence is the future - Wired argues that "Singularity" proponents are fooled by the fact that the beginning of an "S curve" looks like an exponential curve, and that there are limits to what AI can accomplish. In this view, AI augments and improves the human capability, but the world remains irreducible. h/t Communications of the ACM


7. The Justine Damond Case, Update 36: The Heroic Officer Noor? - The question for the Minnesota jury: Is it ok for a police officer to shoot and kill a barefoot, pajama-clad, unarmed, woman after the woman dialed 911 with a noise complaint? This article is from April 29, and the verdict was reached on April 30. The shooter was found guilty of manslaughter and third degree murder.


8. Defending democratic mechanisms and institutions against information attacks - This essay looks at democracy as an information system and examines a number of legal and illegal vectors for an attacker to manipulate the system. Two broad classes of attack are identified. Flooding, which confuse citizens about the beliefs of others, and confidence attacks, which undermine faith in democratic institutions. Implications of the confidence attack are that it may be as important to boost confidence in democratic institutions as it is to guaranty election integrity, and that efforts to publicize concern about election integrity may have a counterproductive effect on democracy, particularly when exaggerated for effect. h/t Bruce Schneier


9. STEEM Life N Times of Synchro Fuze: Calisthenics vs. Free Weights - @synchrfz.fhe writes about his own experiences exercising with free weights and calisthenics - exercises that use body weight for resistance, and concludes that the choice should be based on accomplishing one's own personal goals. (@synchrfz.fhe will get 5% of this post's payout.)


10. For the first time, a drone has been used to deliver a donor kidney - The eight-rotor custom built drone delivered the organ for a 44 year old patient at Johns Hopkin University from another hospital that is 3 miles away, and the transplant operation was a success. Human organs only survive for a few hours outside the body, so the introduction of drones for this purpose has a substantial time and life-saving potential.

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### About this series

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