Numlock News: September 23, 2021 • Gilgamesh, Micronesia, Scams
By Walt HickeyTabletThe Gilgamesh Dream Tablet — a 3,500-year-old clay tablet looted from Iraq 30 years ago, hawked to a London antiquities dealer in 2001 — sold to Hobby Lobby in 2014 and seized by U.S. authorities in 2019 is going home. The tablet, which essentially tells part of the story of the first buddy cop franchise, is one of 17,000 looted items that the U.S. is sending back to Iraq after a first delivery back in July. The tablet is related to a 2017 case in which Hobby Lobby, whose owners also founded the Museum of the Bible, agreed to pay a $3 million fine and return thousands of items that had been stolen and purchased to include in the museum. FliersA team of engineers out of Northwestern University have developed small little airborne electronic sensors that glide gently though air and could be used for future environmental monitoring. Riffing on the structures of wind-enabled seeds from nature, the fliers range in size from 0.4 millimeters to 40 millimeters and are optimized to have the most hang time. The best one of them moves at a languid maximum speed of 28 centimeters per second, which is really good when you consider the terminal velocity of a snowflake is 250 centimeters per second, and the fluttery helicoptering seeds of the ant tree fall at 75 centimeters per second. BooksA new study from Pew Research Center found 23 percent of Americans said they hadn’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, including print, digital and audiobooks. The non-readers have a few things in common: 26 percent of men versus 21 percent of women haven’t read a book in the past year, and whether or not someone went to college has a big impact, as does where they live: 18 percent of urbanites versus 25 percent of suburbanites versus 29 percent of rural residents didn’t read any books. An interesting component is that younger adults —with their dang TikTok and their internet and their distractions and avocado toast and their awful attention spans — were in fact considerably more likely to have read one book than older respondents, with 28 percent of those 50 and up forgoing books compared to just 19 percent of those 18 to 49. Overall, 23 percent didn’t read a book, 5 percent read one, 25 percent read two to five books, 15 percent read six to 10 books, 11 percent read 11 to 20 books and 18 percent of people said they read more than 20 books, which is the highest that figure has been since Pew first polled it in 2011. Risa Gelles-Watnick and Andrew Perrin, Pew Research Center FraudFacebook’s Marketplace has become a hotbed of scammers, in part because scammers flock to any online marketplace and Facebook’s is now the big one. Back in 2019, 6 percent of respondents to a survey said they’d made a purchase on Marketplace, a figure that by 2021 has hit 14 percent. By comparison, that figure was 6 percent in 2021 for Craigslist, previously the home of peer-to-peer online goods exchange. Facebook has 400 workers employed by Accenture monitoring the service to back up the AI system that they use to identify and thwart scammers. To get a sense of how that’s going, those workers reportedly have to handle about 600 complaints per day each. Craig Silverman, A.C. Thompson and Peter Elkind, ProPublica Shifting SandsTwo studies looking at how islands in the Federated States of Micronesia and the Gilbert Islands have changed amid sea level rise found that among 175 sparsely populated or uninhabited islands, while lots of them have shrunk, lots of them have also expanded since the 1940s. Micronesia increased its land area by approximately 3 percent since the ‘40s and the Gilberts are 2.45 percent larger. It clarifies the simplistic idea that all islands are all just going to be sucked under amid sea level rise, which is true in many cases but misses the reality that the complex relationship between tides and waves and surges makes things more complicated to forecast than water go up, island sinks down. DiagnosesA new report from the Department of Health and Human Services identified two tricks used by insurance companies that led to some $9.2 billion in federal payments in the course of a year. The billing strategies — one where insurers review charts for diagnoses that doctors didn’t actually flag, another involving vendor-administered health risk assessments — are controversial, but both are allowed under Medicare. The main thing is the report identified a few insurers who seem to be really milking them: just 20 companies that represent 31 percent of Medicare Advantage enrollment accounted for 54 percent of that $9.2 billion, while the 142 companies that cover the other 69 percent got the rest. Indeed, one company alone — unnamed — generated 58 percent of the payments drawn from health-risk assessments. Anna Wilde Mathews, The Wall Street Journal AlaskaAbout 80 percent of Alaska’s communities can’t be accessed by road, and planes are an essential part of daily life for many. This is one reason Alaska is a comparatively dangerous place to fly, accounting for 42 percent of the country’s fatalities in commuter, air taxi and charter flights since 2016. One study identified Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast systems (ADS-B) as a solution after testing them on 388 aircraft from 1999 to 2006 and seeing a decline in crash rates, but they’re not cheap, and they’re not required in most of Alaska. A full ADS-B unit from Garmin goes for $5,395, and a partial unit that only broadcasts location goes for $1,795. Zoë Sobel, KUCB, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today. The best way to reach new readers is word of mouth. If you click THIS LINK in your inbox, it’ll create an easy-to-send pre-written email you can just fire off to some friends. Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement. 2021 Sunday subscriber editions: Latinos · Vapes · Smoke · Jeopardy! · Mangoes · BBLs · Summer Box Office · Time Use · Shampoo Bars · Wikipedia · Thriving · Comic Rebound · Return of Travel · Sticky Stuff · For-profit Med School · A Good Day · Press Reset · Perverse Incentives · Demon Slayer · Carbon Credits · Money in Politics · Local News · Oscar Upsets · Sneakers · Post-pandemic Cities ·Facebook AI · Fireflies · Vehicle Safety · Climate Codes · Figure Skating · True Believer · Apprentices · Sports Polls · Pipeline · Wattpad · The Nib · Driven2020 Sunday Edition Archive2019 Sunday Edition Archive2018 Sunday Edition ArchiveYou’re on the free list for Numlock News. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. |
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Numlock News: September 22, 2021 • Hand Prints, Los Angeles, Met Gala
Wednesday, September 22, 2021
By Walt Hickey Queued As of Sunday, there were 73 ships waiting to unload cargo at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a brutal logjam just as holiday cargo hits US shores. There are few options
Numlock News: September 21, 2021 • Fake Trees, Poison Ivy, New Fish
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
By Walt Hickey Scams The Justice Department charged 14 people with operating a scam that created fake rideshare driver accounts for unqualified drivers using a complicated scheme involving GPS spoofing
Numlock News: September 20, 2021 • Trolls, Dune, Coupon Fraud
Monday, September 20, 2021
By Walt Hickey Welcome back! The Spice Must Flow Dune, which is out in the US in late October, has begun its international rollout in 24 markets and 7819 screens overseas. In its opening weekend, it
Numlock News: September 17, 2021 • Loopholes, Laser Internet, Christopher Nolan
Friday, September 17, 2021
By Walt Hickey Have a great weekend! Last week I did a Q&A with my friend Daniel Levitt over at his newsletter Inside the Newsroom all about the creation and past couple years of Numlock, his
Numlock News: September 16, 2021 • El Chapo, Van Gogh, Taco Bell
Thursday, September 16, 2021
By Walt Hickey The Lottery Mexico's Institute to Return Stolen Goods to the People will raffle off a former property owned by drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán located in a neighborhood in
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