Curt Long

Curt Long

These Beating Mini-Hearts Could Save Big Bucks—And Maybe Lives

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Crack open the door of the incubator at Novoheart’s Hong Kong headquarters and you’ll find about a dozen pea-shaped, pulsating blobs submerged in a warm, salty-sweet broth. They’re 3-D human heart organoids—a simplified, shrunk-down version of the real thing—the first ever to contain a hollow chamber, like one of the four that’s beating inside your chest right now. And they’re the future of drug testing.

Pharmaceutical companies typically spend billions of dollars and a decade to successfully bring a new medicine to market. Drugs are often felled by harmful side effects that don’t get detected until costly human trials—and the heart is the number one place where things can go wrong. So drugmakers have been looking for ways to identify cardiac issues sooner rather than later.

Novoheart

Miniature hearts respond to treatments a lot like real tissues do; they speed up or slow down, get weaker or stronger. The companies that make them can measure those changes and send that data back to drugmakers so they can flag potential problems before any real humans get involved (or hurt)—companies like Novoheart and New York-based Tara Biosystems, which makes a flat, petri-dish version of live human heart tissue. In the last few years they’ve racked up contracts with top pharma firms to create an early-warning system of sorts.

The idea of using tiny, artificial organs to test drugs isn’t new. But getting the biology to actually work is a recent development. The main problem is that heart cells in culture just don’t want to grow up—to work, they have to mature into all the different kinds of cells that make up an adult human heart. Without that differentiation, they lack many of the proteins where drugs could dock.

When Kevin Costa, Novoheart’s co-founder and director of cardiovascular cell and tissue engineering at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, first started working on mini-hearts, scientists could only grow cells in single layer on a dish. There they could wriggle in place, but they couldn’t contract against a load—which is the thing a real heart does approximately 70 times every minute. To do that, scientists had to bring the cells into the third dimension. They nudged them into free-floating clumps, or spheroids, where unencumbered by flat surfaces they began to develop into some of the different cell types found in natural heart tissue.

Video by Novoheart

But they still weren’t functioning like heart tissue. So next they began organizing those cell types into sheets. Heart muscle is kind of like plywood; it’s made up of layers of distinct cells aligned in different directions, which together allow the tissue to contract with force in response to electrical pulses. Yet even after all that, the engineered tissue strips were still missing some key functions. Costa wondered if just being in the shape of a ventricle could give them many more of the properties found in natural heart muscle.

Getting these layered structures to form a hollow heart sphere, however, took some real creativity.

Novoheart’s scientists placed millions of heart cells genetically reprogrammed from stem cells into a mold along with some secret sauce: a dose of dermal fibroblasts, the cells that help your skin repair itself. That created a mix of cell types that better mimicked natural tissues. Like Jell-O, they glommed onto each other in the shape of an empty globe. Costa says the 3-D tissues are still more like baby hearts than adult hearts, but they respond more realistically than the strip-shaped version. “We don’t fully understand why the hollow sphere responds more like the real thing,” says Costa. “Is it something about fluid slushing around inside it? Do shear stresses impact cell development? It’s not clear to us yet, but there’s definitely something unique about being in that shape. It acts like a heart, so it is a heart.”

Of course, it’s not really a heart. But it is good enough for a bunch of pharma companies to be interested in using it to test for drug toxicity. And Novoheart is also using their mini-hearts to understand diseases better. It just completed a study in partnership with Pfizer to develop a mini-heart model for Friedreich’s ataxia, a rare but deadly hereditary neuromuscular disorder that currently has no FDA-approved treatments. Using cells with the genetic mutations associated with the disease, Novoheart was able to reproduce similar electrical and mechanical malfunctions. Costa hopes it’s just a first step toward creating a whole library of diseased mini-heart models to aid in discovering new medicines, particularly for disorders that lack credible animal models.

Novoheart

Tara Biosystems is also working toward that goal with its tissue strips. And beyond that, it has plans to one day become a platform for personalized drug testing—seeing how heart cells with different genetic backgrounds respond to treatments. But for now, it’s focused on generating 200 new cultures each week to satisfy the growing demands of its 10 pharma clients.

From a regulatory standpoint, their timing couldn’t be better. The FDA is currently considering a new safety screening approach for detecting life-threatening cardiovascular side effects in new drugs. The system would use both computer simulations and tests on the same kinds of cells that make up Tara’s tissue strips and Novoheart’s cardiac chambers.

“The FDA itself has recognized that the assays that are currently universally used are not great, and it’s looking for alternatives,” says Nate Huebsch, a bioengineer at Washington University who’s working with Bay Area startup Organos to develop miniature tissues for drug testing. Even though he’s technically a competitor, he’s impressed by the work coming out of Tara and Novoheart. “Both these companies are helmed by big-time leaders in this field doing cutting edge science,” he says. He also stresses a dose of reality. Mini-hearts aren’t going to fully replace animal models anytime soon. But they could still stop dangerous drugs before they stop a real heart for good.

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Trump’s Trade War Won’t Hurt China. It Could Hurt US Tech

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In the latest installment of the simmering trade war, the Trump administration reportedly plans to impose restrictions on Chinese investments in US technology companies and American technology exports to China. If implemented as rumored, any company with more than 25 percent Chinese ownership would be barred from investing in US companies that produce “industrially significant technology.” Exports of US-made technology deemed important to national security, ranging from chips to robotics to cryptography, would face restrictions as well.

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About

Zachary Karabell is a WIRED Contributor. Karabell is the head of Global Strategies Envestnet and the president of River Twice Research.

The news grabbed headlines and roiled financial markets, but like most things Trump, the noise is much greater than the substance. Within hours, White House aides offered conflicting interpretations, leaving little but confusion. There’s no doubt, however, that new restrictions are being planned, and that these moves would mark a continuation of the confrontational trade policies of the past months.

The cascade of picayune tariffs and aggressive trade rhetoric directed indiscriminately against allies and competitors alike could inflict lasting damage on US companies’ ability to compete globally. For now, though, the effect on day-to-day commerce remains miniscule, with a few notable exceptions—including Harley-Davidson’s plan to relocate some motorcycle production overseas in response to EU tariffs retaliating against Trump tariffs on steel.

The argument for restricting investment by China is that it has been stealing intellectual property unchallenged for decades, and new technologies could give China sizable economic and military benefits. The problem is that little of that activity involved China buying or appropriating the intellectual property of US startups, or sending products made in America to China. If the concerns over IP have some merit, the moves being considered do almost nothing to address them.

For starters, China’s tech investments in the US are remarkably small. The value of China tech investments was $9.9 in billion 2015. That rose by some estimates to more than $15 billion in 2016, and then dipped to $13 billion in 2017; last year’s number would have been much smaller without an $8 billion investment in Uber by Tencent in conjunction with Japan’s Softbank. The number of deals has fallen as well, to 165 last year, from 188 in 2015, and has plunged in 2018 so far. The biggest reasons: The Chinese government has clamped down on easy credit that fueled these deals, and Chinese companies have grown wary of investing in industries that might come under the Washington spotlight.

Compare that with more than more than $70 billion in venture funding for US tech startups last year, plus another $150 billion in private equity funding for technology companies. And that doesn’t include many billions in angel investments, nor tens of billions in R&D spent by the likes of Google, Microsoft, and others.

Much as with immigration, the Trump administration is touting aggressive policies on an issue where the trends have already reversed course. Chinese direct investment is, in relative terms, small; limiting it will have minimal impact on US startups and growth companies (though it’s possible that one of those companies would have become a unicorn of the 2020s). Limiting such investment will also have minimal impact on the domestic Chinese economy. It will, however, cast an even greater pall over future economic ties, further propelling China to seek investments elsewhere.

As for restrictions on US technology exports to China, those too are a pinprick. First, the US government has been selectively trying to contain exports of technology it sees as vital or sensitive for many years. Under Obama, chip makers such as Intel and Nvidia were not allowed to sell certain types of chips with military, supercomputer, or security applications. More to the point, US technology companies don’t export that much to China. Even by a generous definition of technology that includes aircraft parts, US technology exports to China amounted to less than $30 billion in 2017, out of total trade with China in goods and services in excess of $700 billion.

Most of what US tech companies sell to China does not show up as US exports because the products aren’t made in the United States. Hence an iPhone, which is nominally an American product that sells well in China, isn’t actually an American export to China because the phones are mostly assembled in … China.

As a result, restricting what American tech companies can sell to China doesn’t ultimately prevent many of those companies from selling to China, because of their global supply chains. And there’s a good chance the restrictions would lead to unintended consequences: Faced with uncertain crackdowns on their exports from the US, American tech companies could shift more production overseas, rather than risk restrictions on their outbound American-made goods.

And so, here as elsewhere, we have what appears to be forceful action designed to punish China and “restore” American competitiveness. The actual dollar amounts, however, are tiny, and the number of companies that will be meaningfully impacted is small. China is spending heavily on AI research, as well as on cybersecurity and robotics. Preventing Chinese companies from investing a few million here and there on American startups might make it harder for said start-ups to raise money but it changes the competitive balance going forward hardly at all.

As symbols, though, these moves send a message that the United States increasingly is not open for business. They signal to companies around the world that they would be best off looking for alliances and arrangements not subject to unpredictable American tariffs or investment restrictions. Denying foreign companies and countries access to US capital and US markets 20, 30, or 40 years ago would have represented a nearly insurmountable challenge. Faced with such measures, most countries and companies would have and did accommodate American demands. That is not the world we inhabit today.

With limited tools and unlimited words, the Trump administration cannot significantly alter US-China trade today. But it can, and has, soured the climate for future economic bonds. In the short term, the economic harm could be quite limited. It’s the longer-term challenges that should be of greater concern. If Trump’s policies make the US a less desirable place to invest, if they channel ever more global activity away from America, the damage will accrue steadily. Like the frog as the water gets hotter and hotter, it may not feel like much year by year, and when the damage finally hits home, it may be too late. We have time, but it’s not infinite.

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Distracted Driving Is Out of Control, and There’s No Single Cure

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Driving isn’t supposed to be miserable. Open road, your fave tunes, a navigation app to take away the uncertainty. But a new, small study released today by AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety suggests that those infotainment systems built into vehicles’ consoles make driving a bit more dangerous, by demanding too much of those who are supposed to be watching the road.

This study isn’t the first to come to such a conclusion. A bunch of new of research, from scientists and from public companies, indicates that all the gizmos that enterprising capitalists have built to surprise and delight consumers continue to surprise and delight them as they sit behind the wheel.

And distract them, sometimes to dangerous ends. The US Department of Transportation estimates 37,150 people died on American roads in 2017, a slight 0.8 percent decline over 2016—but a leap of more than 10 percent since 2014. Detailed research takes time, and public health officials haven’t definitively traced that jump to smartphones or to distracted driving. But many think it’s at least one likely culprit.

In this latest study, the University of Utah researchers commissioned to run the AAA analysis recruited 64 participants to drive in five different vehicles. At some points during the experiment, they used the manufacturer’s infotainment systems. At others, they ran Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, which use the car’s built-in interface but run software off the user’s smartphone.

Overall, the researchers concluded, the Apple and Android systems do a better job managing their users’ cognitive loads—that is, leaving room in drivers’ brains to actually pay attention to driving. The built-in systems in the five models tested (a 2017 Honda Ridgeline RTL-E, a 2017 Ford Mustang GT, a 2018 Chevrolet Silverado LT, a 2018 Kia Optima, and a 2018 Ram 1500 Laramie) all demanded high or very high levels of attention from drivers as they made phone calls, sent text messages, fiddled with the audio, and entered and followed navigation directions.

The Apple and Android platforms aren’t perfect. CarPlay, for example, demanded more from drivers than Android Auto when it came to entering a destination; the reverse was true for sending text messages. “Both incurred moderately high levels of demand, thus providing opportunities to improve the user experience,” the researchers wrote in their conclusion. Translation: Everyone needs to do better.

Because distraction has real, awful consequences. The startup Nauto equips fleet vehicles with smart cameras built to prevent collisions, and is constantly collecting data on road incidents. It found that, in one four-month period, 67 percent of severe collisions in fleets insured by the company Atlas Insurance Holdings were caused by distracted driving.

Still, researchers (like Utah’s) are working to understand how to manage drivers’ attention. Mobile tech might be making the problem worse, but so too might new automotive technologies. “As you introduce more automation, it’s just going to get worse,” says Jeff Blecher, the chief strategy officer of the company Agero, which provides vehicle safety and roadside assistance systems, and just ran its own study on automation and driver attention. Agero’s data suggests that younger drivers are much more likely to manipulate their phones while driving—that, in fact, drivers 17 to 22 are fiddling with their phones for a full 12 percent of time they’re behind the wheel. ?.

For decades, automation in the aviation industry has proven that humans are really very bad about snapping back to attention once it has been stolen away by a message, a fun app, a funny-looking cloud.

Now that semi-autonomous technology is making its way into consumer vehicles, car companies and the scientists who work at them will need to get savvier about building systems that hold their drivers’ attention. To that end, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are currently in the midst of a multi-year study seeking to understand how drivers use features like Tesla’s Autopilot, rigging up Teslas, Cadillacs, Volvos, and Land Rovers with sensors and cameras to peer inside cars’ inner sanctums.

“This is about human-centered development: leveraging the human element and integrating it with advances in automation,” says Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at MIT who is working on the study. “We should be doing everything from defining how often that driver should be looking at the road and under what conditions, to their ability to detect threats out there.”

Which means, when it comes to cracking how humans interact with exciting, rogue bits of code, there’s plenty of work to do. And it’s going to require serious focus.

Alex Davies contributed reporting.

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Researchers Gather for the International Workshop on Emoji Understanding

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Two years ago, Sanjaya Wijeratne—a computer science PhD student at Wright State University—noticed something odd in his research. He was studying the communication of gang members on Twitter. Among the grandstanding about drugs and money, he found gang members repeatedly dropping the ⛽ emoji in their tweets.

Wijeratne had been working on separate research relating to word-sense disambiguation, a field of computational linguistics that looks at how words take on multiple meanings. The use of ⛽ jumped out as a brand new problem. “They were using the gas pump emoji to refer to marijuana,” says Wijeratne. “As soon as I saw this new meaning associated with the emoji, I thought, what about emoji-sense disambiguation?”

That moment caused Wijeratne to redirected his PhD research toward emoji. This week, he put together the first interdisciplinary academic conference on emoji in research.

At Stanford University this week, a collection of linguists, data scientists, computer researchers, and emoji enthusiasts gathered for the International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media, itself a smaller piece of the AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. They brought with them research on how emoji are changing the way we communicate online, how gender and political affiliation are reproduced online through emoji, and the challenges emoji pose for natural-language processing in computers. The assembled academics also debated basic questions about the nature of emoji: Like, if emoji is something akin to a language, why can’t anyone agree on what individual emoji mean?

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Emoji, which have grown from an original set of 176 characters to a collection of over 3,000 unique icons, present both opportunities and challenges to the academics who study them. Most agree that the icons are not quite a language—the emoji vocabulary is made up almost entirely of nouns, and there’s no real grammar or syntax to govern their use—but their influence on internet communication is massive. By 2015, half of all comments on Instagram included an emoji. On Messenger, Facebook’s messaging app, over 5 billion emoji are sent and received every day. From an academic point of view, that presents a wealth of data to understand communication, behavior, and language online.

But the academic research on emoji has, until recently, been limited. Earlier gatherings like EmojiCon, now in its third year, have brought emoji conversations to the mainstream. But that event—a “celebration of all things emoji”—courts a popular audience, and feels less like a formal conference and more like a party made for Instagram. This week’s Workshop on Emoji Understanding, on the other hand, brought the focus squarely back into academia. The day-long event included a series of paper presentations that privileged data sets and citations over emoji-shaped balloons, and asked more questions than it could answer.

Papers presented at the conference highlighted emoji as markers of solidarity during crisis (think: “Je suis Paris ???”) or as ways to understand differences across gender or political ideologies (women use emoji more than men, but conservative men use way fewer emoji than liberal men). Others discussed the potential to decode emoji with machine learning, and the difficulties in teaching computers to recognize the multiple meanings of emoji in natural-language processing. A panel discussion raised questions about the way the emoji lexicon is developed, as well as the ways emoji can be misinterpreted across cultures. (The ? does not mean the same thing in English as it does in American Sign Language, nor does it mean the same thing to white supremacists.)

Tyler Schnoebelen, who gave the keynote speech on Monday, says conversations about emoji have been too often painted with a broad brush. There’s the utopian vision: emoji as a “universal language,” the great democratizer and harbinger of communication across class, culture, and geography. And then there’s the doomsday vision: emoji as the destruction of language, a political tool, a new way to send violent threats. The nuance often gets lost in between. We have hardly any research to tell us who uses emoji, when, why, and how that use has changed over time. We know even less about what emoji can reveal in disaster scenarios, campaigns, or educational settings; even linguists, who have looked at emoticons and other internet-born languages for decades, don’t have a consensus on what emoji mean for the future of language.

Now, researchers are beginning to turn more seriously toward those research questions. On Monday, linguist Gretchen Mcculloch presented a theory of emoji as beat gestures—the equivalent of gesticulating to add emphasis—rather than a language in themselves. “Letters let us write words, emoji let us write gestures,” she says. Eric Goldman, a legal scholar at Santa Clara University’s School of Law, discussed a forthcoming paper on emoji and the law, which highlights the potential for emoji to create misunderstanding in legal contexts—including high profile cases, like the Silk Road case.

Other scholars are looking for ways to incorporate emoji into preexisting research. “We do a lot of social media research: depression on social media, harassment on social media, the opioid crisis on social media,” says Amit Sheth, a computer scientist at Wright State University and co-organizer of the conference. “In all of those problems, we also see significant use of emoji. If you were to only study the text, you’d be missing out on a lot of information.”

As the conference wrapped up, researchers from institutions in the United States, Spain, India, and Germany shook hands and traded email addresses. That, Wijeratne says, is the point of the event: not to answer questions about the role of emoji in our world, but to connect researchers from around the world and spark ideas for future studies.

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Sneaky Dogs Leave ‘Apology’ For Mail Carrier After Stealing Her Lunch

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Ever since Carol Jordan adopted Bear and Bull six years ago, the black Lab mixes have had a knack for getting into trouble.

Partners in crime since the womb, the two rescue dog brothers delight in wreaking havoc around the house — pulling down drain pipes, chewing up doorjambs and destroying not one, not two, but three lawn mowers.

They could practically have a degree in landscaping after all the holes they’ve dug around their home in Smithfield, Virginia. But no matter what they do, their mom is always quick to forgive their antics.

“They just can’t help themselves,” Jordan told The Dodo. “We never catch them in the act, we just see the destruction afterward.”

These Former Pets Were Just Saved From The Worst Fate

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Since 2009, the Yulin Dog Meat Festival has taken place each June in Yulin, China, to promote the eating of dog meat, which only a minority of Chinese people eat on a regular basis. While dogs are killed for their meat throughout the year in China, thousands more are killed just for the festival.

In many ways, this year has been no different, although Wendy Higgins, director of international media at the Humane Society International (HSI), told The Dodo that this year’s festival seems to be a “more muted affair.”

This Country Just Killed A Super Endangered Whale

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Kristján Loftsson, CEO of Hvalur, has also said that he hopes to use whale meat, blubber and bones to make gelatin, as well as nutritional supplements and other medicinal products — and this news has animal welfare advocates particularly concerned.

“If he does plan on doing that, that will take us back to the battle days of commercial whaling, because previously, meat was not really the main driver of the whaling industry — it was all … the oils, fertilizers and cosmetics that were made out of whale products,” O’Connell said. “That was the kind of thing that kept the whale industry going, and if Mr Loftsson is successful in doing what he claims he is starting to do, it is a very bad sign for the future of whaling.”

Couple Didn’t Neuter Their Two Dogs — Four Years Later, Police Find This

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“The officers asked us for help with around 30 dogs but I was busy dealing with another emergency elsewhere,” Herchy Boal, an inspector with the RSPCA, said in a press release. “When they called me again a few hours later, they were extremely concerned about the conditions they had found the dogs in, claiming they believed there were actually in excess of 40 small-breeds.”

As it turned out, there were actually 82 dogs inside the home. It tooks hours to find them all and transfer them into the care of the RSPCA. Every time it seemed as if they’d all been found, more would pop up from the most unexpected places.

A Microguide to Microdosing Psychedelic Drugs

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Adderall, shmaderall. Certain biohackers prefer taking teeny-tiny amounts of psychedelicdrugs to boost focus. But what exactly is a microdose, anyway? Here’s our semi-scientific guide. Hint: If you feel the trees breathing, you’re doing it wrong.

Acid

Microdose (5–10 mcg): Users claim that a microhit of LSD clears mental locks and helps with depression. It’s often taken first thing in the morning with distilled water—chlorine can kill key compounds.

Overdose: Visions, cosmic oneness, epiphanies about epiphanies.

Mushrooms

Microdose (0.1 g): A taste of psilocybin (or its synthetic version, which is often used in clinical trials) brings on a low-key wave of zenlike happiness. So they say.

Overdose: Warps in spacetime.

Ibogaine Hydrochlorid

Microdose (2 mg): This drug, extracted from iboga roots, can produce a calm focus that, unlike Adderall, also acts as a mild ­aphrodisiac. (Its main use is for detox, often for opiate addicts.)

Overdose: Psychedelia, vomiting, skin numbness.

DMT

Microdose (6 mg, but modes of delivery vary): The main ingredient in ayahuasca tea, DMT might change your perspective—but even small amounts could get you high.

Overdose: Deep vibrations, projectile vomiting, self-transcendence.

This article appears in the June issue. Subscribe now.

12 reasons to upgrade to iOS 12 for iPhone, iPad if you just can't wait

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CLOSE

USA TODAY tech columnist Edward C. Baig looks at three ways your experience with your iPhone may change. USA TODAY

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The future of your iPhone or iPad is here now. Well, sort of.

Apple on Monday released the public beta of iOS 12, the software that will be running at the core of the next iPhone and iPad, and, more than likely, the Apple phone and tablet you already own.

Since this is still an early prerelease beta, trying out iOS 12 now carries some risks, especially if you plan on installing the software on the Apple devices you use every day.

For starters, not all the apps you currently use may work with the public beta. You might experience bugs. Nor are all the features Apple is promising with iOS 12 available yet or fully finished. For example, the Shortcuts app that you might use to set up multistep workflows with Siri is not part of this initial public beta.

If you’re feeling brave and not willing to wait until iOS 12’s official release come fall, head to beta.apple.com to fetch iOS 12 for free.

But first, back up your iOS device before installing the public beta. If you run into a major issue, you can always restore your device to that iOS 11 backup.

I’ve been checking out iOS 12 on a loaner iPhone X. Here are some of the features there now and some that are coming later.

Screen Time

This is the tool many of us have been waiting for, especially if you have kids who are addicted to their phones. But even we elders spend way too much time on our devices. Screen Time lets you apply downtime limits that prevents all but those apps you choose and phone calls to come through. Once an app limit has been reached you’ll have to grant permission to bypass that limit.

You can also surface reports that reveal your device usage, cluing you in on how often you pick up your phone, including when you pick it up during downtime. And you’ll be able to get the usage breakout by games, social networking and other app categories.

Because iOS 12 is in beta, I wasn’t able yet able to apply Family Sharing limits on my kids’ devices since they’re not yet running the latest software.

Those of you who have trouble sleeping might appreciate a new Do Not Disturb during Bedtime feature that dims the display and holds notifications until your set wake-up time.

Group FaceTime

Apple has expanded FaceTime so that you can go beyond one-on-one video calls and use FaceTime with up to 32 people simultaneously. Since iOS 12 is in beta, you’ll have to wait to try this with other people who have loaded iOS 12, or MacOS Mojave, which is also in beta.

Improved multitasking gesture for iPhone X

When Apple removed the physical Home button on the iPhone X – as many people expect they’ll do on future models as well – those of us with Apple’s top-of-the-line handset had to learn a few new navigational gestures.

Though some gestures such as swiping up from the bottom of the screen to return to a Home screen were simple, I couldn’t say the same for the hoops you had to go through on the X to dismiss a running app. First, you had to summon the app switcher or multitasking screen by swiping up and pausing for a second or so. But before you could shut down an app, you had to press down for a moment on a card until a circled red dash appears on the upper left corner. Only then could you swipe up to dismiss that app and any others. With iOS 12, Apple no longer requires you to pause. To which I say, “thank you.”

Set up a second Face ID

As of now anyway, the iPhone X is also the only iPhone to let you take advantage of Face ID facial recognition, but you can only unlock your phone with one person’s mug. Through iOS 12 you can set up what Apple refers to as an “alternate appearance,” perhaps letting you share your device with your significant other. I gave it to a colleague, and he was able to set up his face, giving us both access to the loaner iPhone X.

Improved Safari privacy

Privacy and security have always been of the upmost concern, and it’s not always easy to tell how companies address those issues. Among the measures Apple is taking as part of iOS 12: By default, the Safari browser will prevent you from getting tracked without your permission when you tap a “Like,”or “Share” social media button or a comment widget at a site.

More: Apple will let you know when Facebook is snooping on you

Using AirPods as a hearing aid

If you have trouble hearing another person in a crowded restaurant or bar or can’t hear the professor when you sit in the rear of a lecture hall this new feature could come in handy, assuming you have Apple’s wireless $159 AirPods. In iOS 12 you can now exploit a “Live Listen” assistive hearing app feature that previously was available only with compatible, third-party devices such as hearing aids or implants.

To turn it on, make sure your AirPods are paired per usual through Bluetooth on your iOS 12 device. Then, in Settings go to Control Center, tap Customize Controls and then Hearing. After placing the AirPods in your ears, bring up Control Center on your phone, tap Hearing and then tap Live Listen.

By using the iPhone’s microphone as a directional mic, you’ll hear the amplified sound through the AirPods. Just make sure to place the phone next to the person you want to hear for optimal results, lest you hear unwanted noises.

Calling 911

This is a feature you hopefully won’t have to take advantage of. In iOS 12, people who call 911 using an iPhone would have their location automatically shared with first responders, potentially reducing the time for the victim of an accident, crime, fire or health emergency to get help in a life-saving situation.

More: Calling 911? Apple’s iPhone can tell a first responder where you are

Voice Memos improvements

As a journalist I sometimes record interviews using the built-in Voice Memos app. You can now sync recordings across all your iOS devices. And Apple has added a couple of useful playback features: buttons that let you skip ahead or retreat by 15 seconds. Voice Memos is also available for the first time on the iPad. I still wish Apple would add one more missing feature: the ability to play back recordings at faster (or slower) speeds.

Measure app

Using augmented reality, you can measure objects by drawing virtual lines in free space inside this new Measure app. It’s based on ARKit, which requires an iPhone as old as the SE or 6s models, or a fifth-generation or iPad Pro models. The app also includes the level which was previously in the Compass app on older iOS versions.

Memojis

You had to figure that Apple would build upon the roster of animated emojis or Animojis that it introduced with the iPhone X. And yes,there are now ghost, koala, tiger and T. rex Animojis.

But the real fun – or depending on your point of view, waste of time – starts or ends with Memojis, the Animojis you create that look just like an animated you.

You can add freckles, facial hair, various hairstyles, eyewear and other touches in designing your cartoonish alter ego, making sure to make a face or stick out your tongue for the final, um, flourish. You can then share Memojis in an iMessage or use them in a FaceTime video call from your iPhone X.

Stocks

Apple has dressed up the built-in Stocks app in iOS 12 with more interactive charts, color-coded sparklines and an overall design that better reveals how your portfolio is performing.

Performance

You may not immediately notice in the beta, but Apple is promising an overall zippier performance once iOS 12 is on your phone. Apple claims apps will launch up to 40 percent faster, the keyboard up to 50 percent faster and the camera up to 70 percent faster. Since Apple got into a pickle late last year after it admitted to slowing down older iPhones with suspect batteries, performance is something all of us will be closely watching once the software is released in the fall.

Good news for iPhone fans with older devices: Anyone with iOS 11 (or an iPhone 5s or later) will be able to download iOS 12. Just keep in mind that some of the features arriving with the latest software will require or work better on more recent models.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter

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Apple News Tries to Avoid Facebook’s Mistakes With Midterm Elections Section

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Apple waded knee-deep into the muck of political news delivery Monday with the announcement of a special section in Apple News devoted to the upcoming 2018 midterm elections, which will determine whether Republicans hold onto their majorities in Congress.

From now until November, you will see a little Midterm Elections 2018 banner above the curated Top Stories section of the app. Whether you normally check Apple News just for celebrity gossip and sports doesn’t matter—the app is pushing this module to all US users. Clicking it will take you to a list of stories Apple News editors have deemed trustworthy, well-sourced, uninflammatory, and relevant. It is this human curation that Apple hopes will save it from the misinformation campaigns that have bedeviled other tech companies and online social networks.

“We won’t shy away from controversial topics, but our goal is to illuminate, not enrage. And we’ll always steer clear of rumor and propaganda,” Apple News Editor-in-Chief Lauren Kern wrote in a letter to readers in the app.

That language is a cheeky reference to Facebook, which has faced intense criticism ever since false news spread like wildfire on its platform during the 2016 presidential election. Apple News is not a social media site, and so can avoid some of the network effects that help misinformation spiral out of control. Instead of stories surfaced by an algorithm, the election coverage, like the app’s Top News module, will consist of hand-picked articles, each one scrutinized by a professional.

They have put their trust in Apple’s judgement.

“I applaud Apple for taking on the task of trying to figure out if information is coming from trustworthy sources or not, and I think they are doing it in a pretty responsible way,” said David Chavern, CEO of News Media Alliance, a nonprofit trade group representing 2,000 news organizations in the US.

Chavern and others contrasted this approach to Facebook’s, particularly in the past few years.

Facebook used to have real, live human beings curate news stories, as part of the Trending Topics module launched in 2014. The company fired them all, though, in the summer of 2016, after one former worker told the website Gizmodo that the Trending Topics team habitually passed over stories from conservative news sites. Despite Facebook’s own internal investigation concluding that the bias allegations were largely false, according to WIRED’s reporting, the incident prompted a overcorrection as executives rushed to court conservatives and assure them that Facebook valued a plurality of opinions. They failed to notice the fake news crisis as it unfolded—and the role Trending Topics, whose algorithm amplified fake news and conspiracy theories alongside stories from trusted media outlets, played in it.

After the election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged his company’s misinformation problem in a post. “We’re a new kind of platform for public discourse – and that means we have a new kind of responsibility to enable people to have the most meaningful conversations, and to build a space where people can be informed,” he wrote that December. And yet, he added in the next sentence, “With any changes we make, we must fight to give all people a voice and resist the path of becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”

Facebook has since taken additional steps to address false news. It has tweaked the algorithm to emphasize personal posts and connections rather than news. It added third-party fact checkers, a political ad database for transparency, an ad campaign to educate the public about fake news, and a method to identify “trusted news sources.” But Facebook’s way of defining a trusted source was just to ask users, “Who do you trust?” That had the glaring problem of perpetuating political silos, where conservatives and liberals alike highly rate outlets that reflect to their world views and downvote anything opposed. Though this preference for ideologically conforming information is not new, Facebook’s role as the town hall or water cooler of the internet multiplies its effect.

Apple takes a different approach, the one thing Facebook has so far refused to do: giving the reins to journalists. Apple won’t say exactly how many journalists it employs as Apple News editors, but a representative says it in the dozens. The company’s announcement of its elections section and Kern’s letter to readers both emphasized the promise of delivering trustworthy, accurate stories vetted by experienced editors.

Apple’s press release also makes glancing reference to local news, which has been particularly hollowed out in the digital era. A special feature called “On the Ground” will highlight local news, though whether that will come from local organizations or national outlets is unclear.

While Apple News may be largely insulated from the social media network effects of its Silicon Valley peers, it is not immune to allegations of bias—the other critique that has dogged Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Apple highlighted Fox News, Vox, Axios, the Washington Post, and Politico as among the publications it will feature at launch, representing a wide spectrum of US political coverage. But some questioned the inclusion of Fox, which has recently come under fire for its coverage of the Trump administration, among other controversies.

“The upcoming Apple News election product strikes all the right notes on design (human-edited, well-structured) but the very first news source they mention is Fox News, indicating they have the same fear of right-wing liars as all the other tech platforms,” technologist Anil Dash wrote on Twitter.

“Whether or not you like Fox, the fact of the matter is they hire and pay reporters, they hire and pay editors, and you know where to send your complaints,” Chavern says. In other words, Fox is a legitimate journalistic outfit. It’s not a Macedonian fake-news farm.

Dash wasn’t alone in finding the Fox News shoutout jarring, though. “Apple has always been a control freak. That applies to news. Here’s a new press release in which the company says, essentially, that it’s going to pick the winners among journalism organizations based on quality. Note, however, that Fox ‘News’ is included,” tweeted media expert and journalist Dan Gillmor, co-creator of News Co/Lab at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Gillmor’s larger point—that Apple is appointing itself the arbiter of quality news—is exactly the kind of critique Facebook tries to avoid by insisting it’s neutral. But just because an algorithm is deciding instead of a human doesn’t make a platform neutral. “Too often a lot of the big tech companies have hidden behind the idea that they need to be neutral when it comes to content and what that has really meant is that there’s a huge emphasis on garbage and fake news that crowds out the responsible sources,” Chavern says. Neutral is just another way of saying not-liable. With its new midterms section, Apple is accepting responsibility as mediators for the most controversial news of all, the political.

But the question remains how Apple will react when, inevitably, people take issue with the decisions its editors make.

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Seriously, save money on gas, hotels and shopping with these 8 apps

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Columnist Marc Saltzman reviews his favorite apps that find you deals and get you money back on hotels, shopping and gas. Marc Saltzman, USA TODAY

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You don’t need to be cash-strapped to appreciate saving money.

In other words, why pay more than you need to?

Both the App Store (for iPhone and iPad) and Google Play (for Android devices) are packed with apps tied to shopping deals, accessing free content, booking affordable travel and accommodations, as well as managing your money and time.

But with so many downloads available, finding a few that truly work could be an overwhelming endeavor.

The following are a handful of my favorites, and why.

More: 10 must-have apps for your phone

More: Apps that made me say wow in 2017

Before you shop online or at retail, consider these free apps.

Ebates

There are a few “cash back” apps available, but one I’ve used for years is Ebates, mostly because of how many online stores and marketplaces are supported – now more than 2,500 – including Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Macy’s, Target, Kohl’s, Best Buy, American Eagle, and Groupon, to name a few.

The premise is simple: open the app before you start shopping (or if you’re a desktop shopper, download the browser plug-in) and once you make a purchase at a supported store, you’ll get a percentage of your purchase credited to your account. It’s typically between 2 and 6 percent, depending on the store, but it can be as high as 40 percent over the holiday season (stores pay Ebates a commission for sending you there, and so they share it with you). Quarterly, you’ll get a check or PayPal deposit.

The app will also notify you of sales and special offers, plus there’s in-store coupons and promo codes, too. As added incentive for signing up for a free account, you’ll get a $10 bonus when you make your first purchase.

More: Score a new iPhone? Download these 12 apps

More: This smartphone trick lets you do more in less time

Flipp

Another “must have” mobile companion, especially for retail shopping, is Flipp.

Essentially, this one app delivers local store ads to your phone, tablet or computer – rather than you having to make a mess of your kitchen (and hands) by going through the paper circulars you get each week. Better yet, Flipp makes it easy to search for the best deals on the items you want, rather than merely digitizing the pages.

Just type in your zip code the first time and then it lets you browse or search for deals at stores near you — whether you’re shopping for groceries, household goods, fashion items, or consumer electronics – plus you can find and use coupons for popular brands, too.

Tap and hold to learn more about a product or tap quickly to virtually clip it into your shopping list. In fact, one of my favorite things about the shopping list is that you can add all the items you want to buy – such as chicken breasts for a family barbeque — and the app will show you all of the nearby stores that have it on sale.

The app also holds your loyalty cards, so you don’t have to carry a pocket- (or purse)-full of physical cards with you.

Load up some apps to save money, time and aggravation, while traveling this summer.

Hotels.com

There’s no shortage of apps to save on hotels, but when it comes to discounted rooms and rewards, one of the oldest is still one of the best. Now more than a quarter of a century old (when they were a phone service), Hotels.com enjoys a clean and easy-to-use interface, huge selection of properties to choose from, maps and Uber integration, and support for smartwatches.

More importantly, perhaps, is a “secret price” feature for members, which shows deals on boutique hotels and chains, along with a great loyalty and rewards program (“stay 10 nights and get the next one free”). As for its price guarantee, I recently booked a room in New York City that dropped its rate by $91, and so the app notified me about the change.

To reduce the likelihood of fake reviews, all customers who rate or review a hotel must have stayed there.

Also consider apps like Airbnb for staying in people’s homes.

More:These are the best apps to save money on last minute travel

More:Saving receipts can mean big money in 2018

More:12 incredibly useful travel apps you didn’t know about until now

GasBuddy

Planning a road trip this summer? As the name suggests, GasBuddy helps sniff out deals on gasoline and diesel in the U.S. and Canada. Using GPS, the app shows you which nearby stations have the lowest prices – for regular, midgrade and premium fuel — and provides maps if you don’t know the area. View gas stations by distance, price, company, or amenities (like car washes, restaurants, and washrooms).

Obviously, this app is more useful when you’re in a big city – as it doesn’t pay to drive a few miles just to save, say, $2 on a fill up – but it does really add up. The app says you can save $340 a year by telling you exactly where and when to buy gas.

Other features include a GasBuddy Trips feature (using your phone’s sensors, the app can show you events that are costing you fuel economy and dollars); price hike alerts so you can fill up before the increase; deals offered by local convenience stores; and an optional GasBuddy points program (and daily prize draw) to save even more.

It’s not just shopping apps that can save you money, but ones that help you manage your purchases and expenses.

Mint

As with the website it’s based upon, Intuit’s Mint.com Personal Finance app helps you set budgets, track expenses and reach financial goals.

After you link up your bank and credit cards, this handy money management tool lets you see what you’re spending (and saving) through color-coded lists, charts and graphs, plus you can track your bank account and credit card balances in real-time, follow investments (including retirement contributions and balances), and even break out your expenditures by category.

As an opt-in feature, receive alerts when it’s time to pay a bill or if you’ve exceeded your budget or face possible late fees (notified via email or text message). A related feature is a weekly summary email of your money, along with a tab that shows the history of your spending, income, and net worth over time.

As with most other personal finance apps, Mint is password-protected, therefore your data is safe even if your device is lost or stolen.

Office Lens

Microsoft’s Office Lens is like having a flatbed scanner in your pocket: snap a pic of a document, whiteboard, receipt or business card, and it’ll be immediately digitized onto your device.

You can trim each document once imported, plus printed and handwritten text will be automatically recognized (using OCR technology), so you can search for words in images and then copy and edit them, and if desired, imported into Office apps (Word, PowerPoint, OneNote), saved to OneDrive or other cloud storage, or converted into PDF.

With receipts, this is ideal for those who need to submit expenses after business travel. Also consider the ExpenseIt app from Concur.

And if you’re looking to avoid long-distance fees while traveling, consider making calls (or video calls) through apps like Skype, Google Duo, WhatsApp, or FaceTime.

Finally, a couple of suggestions for consuming media at no charge.

Libby

Of course, you’re aware you can buy ebooks and audiobooks for your smartphone or tablet. But did you know you can also borrow them from your local library? Yes, for free, and with no late fees.

So long as you have your library card and the Libby app installed on your device, there are tens of thousands of supported libraries worldwide. It’s not just old classics, but many of the newer New York Times bestsellers, too.

Libby also boasts an impressive built-in ebook reader, graphic novel viewer, and audiobook player.

Spotify

Rather than paying for a monthly subscription service or buying music by track, those who are tight on cash might consider the free version of Spotify — a stellar digital music, podcast, and video streaming service — that gives you instant access to millions of songs, and other content.

For use on smartphones, tablets and computers, simply type in the name of the artist, song, genre or playlist you like. Or browse by Charts, Moods, New Releases, Discover, and other sections.

Upgrading to Spotify Premium gives you access to high-quality streaming of more than 35 million tracks, no ads, support for offline play, and more.

Also consider the free TuneIn Radio and iHeartRadio apps.

Surf Report readers, what money-saving apps do you rely on? Feel free to spread the word by sharing your favorites in the Comments section.

Follow Marc on Twitter: @marc_saltzman. E-mail him at tech@marcsaltzman.com

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Exploring How to Change the Way the World Literally Sees You

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Beauty, to borrow a cliché, is in the eye of the beholder. But what if your beholder’s eyes could be hacked? What if yours could? In Reality+, they can be. The short film—from Revenge writer-director Coralie Fargeat—imagines a future where people can buy an implant that allows them to live in an alternative reality where they can be seen as they want to be seen.

Reality+, which you can watch in full above, is set in Paris in the future. In this timeline, those looking for an upgrade can get an implant at the base of their necks that taps into their nervous system and lets them see their reflection however they like. They can change their hair, the shape of their face, their physique—anything. And in the time that their Reality+ implant is activated (it can only be used 12 hours per day), anyone else whose implant is running will see them as they’ve chosen to be seen. Unsurprisingly, most people choose to look like underwear models.

As it ends, Reality+’s message is that, to borrow another cliché, beauty is only skin deep—the essence of a person can’t be seen with the eyes. But it’s kind of a shame that the movie has to end there. The implications of technology that can alter people’s perceptions of themselves and the world is profound. Could it let people experience life as another gender? As someone older or younger? Could criminals use it to mask their identities? Would people use it to impersonate someone else? The questions are endless. Reality+, being a short film, doesn’t have time to answer them. But hey, maybe Fargeat could make a full-length feature?

You can watch the film, which was recently licensed by WIRED, above.

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Sprint's $15 unlimited data plan required a 'hard pull' credit report, and it's not the only one

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Signing up for a new wireless plan can reveal unsavory surprises, from restrictions on sharing your bandwidth with a laptop to limits on the resolution of streaming video. But even the most straightforward subscription usually involves a less obvious cost: letting the carrier perform a detailed inspection of your credit history.

That took Steve McLeod, a retired project manager in Clearwater, Florida, by surprise when he tried to sign up for the Kickstart Unlimited plan Sprint briefly offered. Sprint wouldn’t let McLeod do that unless he first gave the firm permission to get a full copy of his credit report.

That detailed inquiry, often called a “hard pull” and a standard part of getting a new credit card or loan, has become almost routine in the wireless industry when signing up customers for traditional subscription plans.

“Cell phone companies pulling hard credit reports has become the norm,” Nichole Mustard, co-founder of the personal-finance service CreditKarma, said in an email. “If you’re a new customer or buying a new phone on a monthly payment plan, companies could use your credit score to determine the type of payment plan options you’ll be offered and whether they’ll require a deposit.”

Mustard emphasized that a hard pull of a credit report – while it may feel invasive – should do no long-term harm to your credit rating by itself. Repeated hard pulls, however, can look bad depending on the context.

“For example, if you’re shopping for a mortgage, banks understand you’re going to apply for multiple loans in a short period of time to find the lowest interest rate,” she said. “But if you apply for five credit cards on the same day, that’s another story.”

Kickstart required subscribers switching from another carrier to either bring their own phone or pay Sprint a new phone’s full price upfront – which, unlike Sprint’s standard offer, didn’t leave the Overland Park, Kansas, company on the hook for any handset costs.

Kickstart did, however, have Sprint billing for service after providing it. That “postpaid” structure still leaves the carrier exposed to some financial risk.

Sprint said requesting a full copy of a potential Kickstart subscriber’s credit report fit into its standard practice, but one wireless-industry analyst called it “strange” with only service costs at stake.

“The money at risk is relatively low, and if the carrier suspects fraud they just cut the person off,” said Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics. A carrier incurs much more risk when it lets a customer lease a phone or pay for it in installment plans – as, he noted, Sprint learned the hard way.

In a May 2017 annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sprint cited losses of $481 million on phone leases “where customers did not return the devices to us.”

To avoid a hard pull of your credit, you’ll usually have to decline postpaid service in favor of “prepaid” service – where, as that term suggests, you pay at the start of a month for the service you get over the rest of the month.

These services, sold by carriers under their own brands and those of subsidiaries such as Sprint’s Virgin Mobile USA and also by third parties that resell their networks, can offer substantial savings to customers who talk, text or go online less than average.

Some, however, require the equivalent of a down payment. T-Mobile’s No Credit Check plan, for instance, comes close to matching the features of its postpaid plans but requires a refundable deposit: $50 for the first line, $30 for the second and $20 for lines three, four and five.​​​​


Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, email Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.

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Red Hen, Trump, and the Weaponization of Yelp

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Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced on Twitter Saturday that she and her family had been asked to leave the Red Hen, a small restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. The Red Hen’s co-owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, reportedly asked Sanders to leave because of her involvement in Trump administration policies like separating migrant children from their parents. Word of the incident quickly spread across the internet and on Monday, President Donald Trump lobbed an insult at the Red Hen, alleging that the restaurant’s exterior is “dirty.”

But the majority of the backlash against the Red Hen came on a different platform: Yelp. Many of the press secretary’s supporters spent the weekend vandalizing the restaurant’s page by leaving thousands of fraudulent one-star reviews. Others who agreed with Wilkinson’s decision responded by writing retaliatory five-star reviews, turning Yelp into an unwilling platform for political speech. In essence, Yelp became a battleground—and not for the first time. For years, crowd-sourced review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor have been manipulated by trolls, paid reviewers, and politically enraged citizens. But we rarely consider how sites like Yelp fight back—and what their tactics mean for businesses and users.

This is far from the first time that Yelp has experienced a surge in vandalism in response to the news cycle. In 2012, for example, trolls famously defaced a pizza parlor’s page after the restaurant’s owner posted a picture of himself hugging former President Barack Obama. The issue comes up enough that Vince Sollitto, Yelp’s senior vice president for corporate communications, penned a blog post in 2016 explaining the company’s strategy for when similar incidents happen.

As Sollitto explains, Yelp doesn’t display every review left for a business in chronological order; the company uses an algorithm to sort reviews according to a number of signals, including whether they may be biased or fraudulent. Reviews that get sorted out also don’t contribute toward a business’s overall rating.

In situations like the Red Hen’s, Yelp deploys what it calls an Active Cleanup Alert, a pop-up that encourages users to discuss a business on Yelp’s discussion forums rather than leaving a review; it also warns them that fake ones will be removed. While the alert is active, Yelp employees work to identify and remove what they believe are fraudulent reviews. Again, Yelp blogged about this policy in 2016 and Active Cleanup Alerts were created the year before.

So in theory, when a local business becomes part of a national controversy, Yelp has an established strategy to deal with the fallout. In reality, the Red Hen’s Yelp page remains a mess. It had more than 15,000 reviews at the time of writing and the restaurant’s overall rating is down to 1.5 stars, from nearly five stars several days ago. People have attacked unaffiliated restaurants with similar names, and some have baselessly accused Red Hen of being run or owned by pedophiles.

Part of the problem, as Motherboard points out, is that Yelp doesn’t require reviewers to verify that they’ve actually visited a business, making it easy to turn the platform into a place for protest.

To be fair, Yelp has to manage more than 155 million reviews, according to the company, and not all of its resources can realistically be dedicated to defending one restaurant. Yelp’s moderators are also up against people like conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who encouraged his more than 600,000 Twitter followers Sunday to leave 100,000 additional reviews on the Red Hen’s page. TripAdvisor, for its part, temporarily stopped allowing reviews to be posted at all.

The Red Hen’s Yelp page looks especially troublesome compared to the restaurant’s Google reviews. At the time of writing, the Red Hen had a modest 45 reviews, all of which appeared legitimate; there’s no sign that the restaurant is at the heart of a national controversy. It’s possible that trolls simply didn’t target the Red Hen’s Google page in the same way. But it’s also possible that the tech giant is more adept at moderating.

A Google representative says that the company has a dedicated team and systems in place to identify incidents like what happened to the Red Hen. “Once identified, we use both automated and manual techniques to ensure that reviews adhere to our policies and that any new edits to business information are accurate,” the spokesperson said in a statement. (That doesn’t mean Google has always been free from manipulation; the Verge found last year that for-profit substance abuse rehabs had exploited its systems.)

Online reviews have also served as legitimate venues for social and political commentary; it’s not always clear what we lose when “fraudulent” ones are deleted en masse. In 2012, then-candidate Mitt Romney made a comment about “binders full of women” during a presidential debate. In response, a number of users left satirical Amazon reviews on listings for products like three-ring binders, a phenomenon chronicled in a 2015 study in the journal Feminist Theory.

“For any of you who might be considering, like me, purchasing this binder based on the reviews, let me just point out one glaring omission: While this is a lovely, multi-purpose binder, IT DOES NOT COME WITH WOMEN,” one reviewer wrote.

More recently, a vintage store in Brooklyn, New York was accused of racially profiling a black lawyer and her daughter last month after an employee believed the pair was shoplifting and called the police. The police didn’t find any stolen merchandise, and the incident ignited a small protest. In response, Yelp set up another Active Cleanup Alert and the store’s several dozen reviews no longer reflect the incident.

Some shoppers might want to know that a store was recently the site of a protest. Plenty of consumers may also want to choose one business over another on moral grounds. That’s a reality that Yelp even acknowledges in its 2016 blog post: “Many people understandably wouldn’t want to patronize a dentist who kills lions as a hobby, and others might legitimately be inclined to choose one pizza parlor over another based on their political views,” Sollitto wrote.

Yelp nonetheless chooses not to reflect that sort of feedback in its reviews, because it ultimately thinks “the better proposition is for Yelp reviews to be driven by firsthand customer experiences.” It has a point; most people come to Yelp simply to find genuine recommendations for places to eat and shop. And businesses can’t do anything to improve reviews that aren’t based on actual experience.

“When businesses make the news, their Yelp business page can be affected. Media-fueled reviews typically violate our Content Guidelines, one of which deals with relevance. Yelp reviews are required to describe a firsthand consumer experience, not what someone read in the news,” a Yelp spokesperson said in a statement.

But by encouraging on-topic reviews, Yelp also helps itself. The platform, like other social networks, has grown rich as a result of the free labor that people have contributed to it. Without a steady supply of helpful, pleasant-to-read reviews, Yelp doesn’t have a business.

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These are the 5 best Amazon deals right now

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— Our editors review and recommend products to help you buy the stuff you need. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today’s newsroom and any business incentives.

While Amazon hasn’t yet announced the official date of Prime Day, rumors are swirling that it’ll fall on or near July 17. As such, there’s been a significant decline in deals on worthwhile items. While this bodes well for anyone waiting to see what discounts Prime Day will offer, it’s not so great if you’re looking to save money on something you need sooner than later.

Thankfully, there are still a handful of deals that are good enough to impress us, and they’re on useful products. But, if you don’t need to buy something right away, we do recommend adding what you need/want to your Amazon cart or wish list and waiting until Prime Day for the best shot at the best deals. In the mean time, here are the top deals we found on Amazon today.

1. Tools to make yard work something you look forward to

Yard work can seem like a chore, but it can also be fun, especially if you’ve got a good set of power tools and equipment to get the job done faster. Right now, Greenworks is running a Deal of the Day on a whole arsenal of lawn care tools, including a mower, a pole saw, a blower, a string trimmer, and a hedge trimmer.

They’re all cordless and run on the same 80V battery (also on sale today), which can be used interchangeable so you don’t need one battery for each tool. Some include the battery, some don’t so pay attention to what you’re getting. Greenworks’ outdoor lawn equipment is always popular among our readers when it goes on sale, and these are the best prices we’ve seen on these products in about a year.

2. Extra-long lightning cables for convenient charging

A charging cable that’s just to short to use comfortably while charging your phone is not a world-ender, but it is annoying. The best solution, aside from using your phone less and conserving the battery, is to get a cable that gives you more flexibility. Right now, Anker’s discounting its 10-foot lightning cables in red, black, gold, and silver, but you’ll need to use the code “ANKER454” at checkout.

I’ve been using these cables for the last few years and I love them. They’re powerful enough to fast-charge (with the right adapter), and the braided nylon prevents fraying and splitting. I personally opted for the red cables and couldn’t be happier, but the silver, gold, and black are just as nice.

Get the Anker Powerline+ II 10-Foot Lightning Cable for $13.99 (Save $6) with the code “ANKER454”

3. A new set of sheets with loads of positive reviews

Sleeping on a fresh, new set of sheets is hard to beat, and right now you can pick up a highly rated set in one of Amazon’s Deals of the Day. These sheets are made of 100% Egyptian cotton and tout a 1000 thread count.We haven’t seen the price drop this low for this sheet set since last September, and while $86 might seem like a lot to shell out for sheets, nearly 2,000 reviewers claim it’s well worth the investment. They’re soft, well made, and machine washable, and they come in a variety of colors. One buyer even said “these are some of the nicest sheets I’ve ever seen, let alone slept in.”

Get the Thread Spread True Luxury Egyptian Cotton Sheet Set for $86.24 (Save $28.75)

4. The classic KitchenAid stand mixer

Whether you’ve got a wedding coming up or you’re just ready to upgrade your baking game, you’ll be delighted to know that the ever-popular KitchenAid stand mixer is on sale right now. You can get it for just $210 in a handful of fun colors, including almond, majestic yellow, cobalt blue, tangerine, pistachio, and persimmon. Considering the Artisan mixer usually sells for $300-$400 (depending on the color) this discount has us excited.

Get the KitchenAid Artisan 5-Qt. Stand Mixer for $209.99 (Save $80)

5. Cult-favorite water bottles

Drinking enough water every day can do wonders for your health. Staying hydrated is great for your energy levels, your skin, and your appetite. The easiest way to ensure you’re on top of your intake is to keep a water bottle with you. Right now, there’s a Deal of the Day on six different Contigo water bottles, many of which are down to their lowest prices in months. I had an older version of the Addison bottle a couple years ago and loved it until I lost it on the train. They’re well-made, they don’t leak, and they’re large enough that you’re not constantly refilling them.

Prices are accurate at the time this article was published, but may change over time.

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Facebook has 'no plans' to listen in on your conversations (for now), but the creepy stories mount

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Zuckerberg shoots down conspiracy theory that Facebook taps your microphone in his Senate hearing. USA TODAY

Facebook has ‘no plans’ to listen to your conversations for now. But the social media giant does not appear to be ruling out the possibility that at some point it might.(Photo: Pixabay)

SAN FRANCISCO – California technology analyst Brian Solis was having a conversation with a friend while the two were driving through Texas. His friend was buying a ranch in Texas but was having trouble with the financing because it was considered a “barndominium.” Solis had never heard the term before nor had he ever researched it online.

But as soon as he hopped out of his friend’s car and checked Facebook, up popped an ad for barndominiums in Texas.

“How is that possible?” he wrote on Facebook.

His friends piled on with stories. Facebook began showing ads from a bathing suit company to one friend after her daughter showed her something in person she bought there. Another says she was talking about Lexus with a friend in the car and then the friend started getting Facebook ads from Lexus.

People were split on whether Facebook was listening in. Maybe it was tracking people when they were together and showing them ads of interest to their friends, Solis speculated. But, he said, “the general consensus was that something was happening that is creepy. It was just too specific to be a coincidence.”

No matter how many times Facebook denies it and media outlets like this one write articles debunking it, people keep getting freaked out that the social media giant is eavesdropping on their conversations.

The unfounded theory goes like this: Facebook records audio over smartphone microphones and then uses voice recognition software to show relevant ads in people’s News Feeds. Facebook says it only accesses users’ microphones if they have given the Facebook app permission and if they are actively using a specific feature that requires audio such as voice messaging.

But the theory keeps floating around the Internet like a bad cold. In April, Mark Zuckerberg was asked about audio surveillance while testifying before Congress.

“Yes or no, does Facebook use audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about users?” asked Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat. “No,” the Facebook CEO replied.

 

Facebook still flat-out denies it’s bugging your conversations like Gene Hackman in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film “The Conversation.” The reason to believe Facebook? It collects so much information on its 2.2 billion users, it really doesn’t need to. But its latest remarks on the subject have set off a new wave of concerns.

The subject came up again last week when Facebook responded in writing to questions posed by lawmakers.

Facebook reassured Congress several times it’s not listening in on people’s conversations. But in a response to Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who had asked if Facebook would commit to never surreptitiously gathering audio or visual information on its users, Facebook repeated that it does not currently listen to users, but did not rule out eavesdropping in the future.

 

“NOT EVEN A PINKY PROMISE?” asked online publication Quartz. Then Slate pressed Facebook on the subject. Facebook replied: We don’t eavesdrop on people and “we have no plans to change this.”

Facebook told USA TODAY the same. “Facebook has never used your phone’s microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed, and we have no plans to do so in the future,” Facebook’s vice president of ads Rob Goldman said.

That may be reassuring to some, says Slate, but it’s still different from saying no way will this ever happen.

“The takeaway at this point seems to be: Facebook isn’t spying on us via our phones, and it doesn’t have immediate plans to do so in the future,” wrote Will Oremus, “but you never know.”

But “you never know” is what keeps these suspicions alive and kicking. That and the fact that the tech industry is very much getting into the listening business, with digital helpers on smartphones and smart speakers that exist to listen for our voice commands and respond to our every want and need.

“We are living in an era where active listening is now becoming an extension of our connectivity,” Solis says.

These new devices sitting on bedside tables and kitchen counters are a big hit – but there have been some mishaps, too.

The Google Home and Amazon Echo are always listening, but they are only supposed to start recording when they hear a voice command. With Google Home, that’s “OK Google” or “Hey Google.”

Last October, a tech blogger discovered the Google Home was recording audio in his home even when he didn’t give voice commands. And a Portland, Oregon, family’s private conversations were recorded by their Amazon Echo smart speaker and emailed to a random phone contact.

These experiences may be anomalies, but Solis says consumers are becoming wary. And on the heels of Russian interference and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook isn’t one of America’s most trusted companies right now.

Facebook executives seem to know that audio surveillance is a touchy subject these days. The Silicon Valley company shelved plans to introduce Facebook’s new home product – connected speakers with digital-assistant and video-chat capabilities to compete with Google’s Home and Amazon’s Echo – until the company could review how the device handles people’s personal information and how people respond to it.

For Facebook and the industry, Solis suggests this rule of thumb. Don’t listen in on conversations unless people know you are listening and have given you permission to listen.

As a consumer, Solis says, “I am not comfortable with active listening on devices that I haven’t explicitly authorized to listen.”

If you’re worried about Facebook surveillance, here’s what you can do: Go into your phone settings, choose Facebook and turn off the permissions that allow the Facebook app to access the microphone. But be forewarned: You will need to turn those permissions back on to record live videos with sound.

More: How to stop your devices from listening to (and saving) what you say

More: How Facebook tracks your every move: Fact vs. fiction

More: How to listen to what Amazon’s Alexa has recorded in your home

 

 

 

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