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Links for 2022-02-14

  • a short story about pandemic misinformation & biased reporting

    Well-illustrated case study from 2021 in how misinformation evolves in the mainstream press. First, an Irish Times journalist concocted a thesis (“Given that only 1 in 1,000 cases of COVID-19 come from an outdoor setting, is the government too prohibitive on people meeting outdoors?”), and got a weakly confirmatory response from the HPSC (who should have known better). Through poor reporting by other newspapers around the world, this quickly became a “fact” reported by an Irish “study” — despite being nothing of the sort — and published in the New York Times and NPR. Eventually it became a research reference in several academic papers and the BMJ. Naturally, warnings from experts, and the Minister for Health, about its inaccuracy, were ignored. What a mess…

    (tags: misinformation irish-times fail health covid-19 safety hpsc new-york-times npr bmj)

  • A decade of major cache incidents at Twitter

    a massive list of cache-related outages from Dan Luu — I still have fear of large scale cache reliance, inherited from Amazon, and this terrifying list doesn’t help!

    (tags: caching architecture twitter ops outages history)