• APART FROM MENTAL REGRESSION, VIDEO GAMES CAN BE PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS from people injuring themselves – literally unable to “see where they’re stepping, punching or kicking while in gameplay, including shoulder dislocations from keeping arms raised (‘gorilla arm syndrome’), hand & arm cuts from tennis shots smashing furnishings, and head movement neck fractures reported.”  [WALL ST. JOURNAL – 2/1/22]
  • ‘STATISTICS’ COME FROM COMPILATIONS OF DATA ALWAYS BASED ON ANALYTICAL APPROACHES. A major study of financial-market datasets (more than 700 million trades over 17 years) by 164 separate teams of researchers at Northwestern University have confirmed that there is always a bias (conscious or not) in finding statistically significant results. Analysis found that of equal importance to Standard Errors – about degree of uncertainty in parameter estimation called ‘standard deviation’ – are Nonstandard Errors which relate to choices & decisions about ways to philosophically approach & measure data, including sample size/ geography/ outliers/ model form/ software/ etc. So, reminder that trusting and relying on ‘statistics’ from any source as a basis for personal opinions about ‘Truth’ and/or decision-making is dangerous and often foolish.  [KELLOGG INSIGHT – 1/7/22]
  • TODAY’S NFT (NON-FUNGIBLE TOKEN) MARKET IS FAR FROM A SAFE HAVEN, and highly likely to crash. An NFT is simply a “tradeable code attached to metadata, such as an image, which records the sale on a digital ledger (typically Ethereum blockchain), providing ‘proof’ of both authenticity and ownership.” However, the NFT ‘asset’ is intangible and subject to inevitable risks: (1) Infinite supply, with no difference in appearance between actual & freely-downloadable copies, and no right to prevent others from using;  (2) Comprised of simply a link to a digital image, technically copyrighted but with near impossibility of enforcing, due to “transaction cost related to monitoring infinite online venues, identifying illegitimate use, pursuing & prosecuting infringement”;  (3) Competing and evolving technologies & standards for blockchain & crypto likely to be superseded, along with disappearance of companies dealing in NFTs;  (4) ”Investor attention for art and other luxury products  is fleeting, and declined some 40% after the last global crisis even with hard assets to back them up.” [PROJECT SYNDICATE – 1/28/22]
  • THE ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’ BAROMETER IS TEMPERATURE OF THE PLANET’S OCEANS, which comprise 90% of earth surface and absorb 90% of global warming, according to scientists.  A 100-year research project now contends that “by 2014, more than half the monthly-maintained records across the entire ocean had surpassed a once-in-fifty-years ‘extreme’ benchmark, that heat content of the top 1¼-mile depth set a new heat record last year, with species like lobster & scallops in N.E. America and Canada now impacted, fourteen Alaskan fisheries already declared federal disasters, and that ‘extreme climate’ is past the point of no return.”  [THE GUARDIAN – 2/1/22]
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

      Shipment Delivery scams now lead phishing campaigns, targeted mostly to employees in Shipping Departments or those working at home. Messages contain official-looking DHL of USPS logos to trick readers into clicking links or attachments which download credential-stealing malicious malware, according to Threatpost.

       “Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature… The quaint old forms – elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest – will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism” – Aldous Huxley – 1958