The IEEE Standards Association is trying to help readers detect such content with its new IEEE P7011 Standard for the Process of Identifying and Rating the Trustworthiness of News Sources.

Source: IEEE Standard to Rate the Trustworthiness of News Sites

You may not know who the IEEE is but if you use WiFi, or Ethernet or a whole lot technologies, you are using the work of their working groups. Before it was called “WiFi”, it was known as 802.11, and you still see many references to 802.11a, b, ac, g ,n , ad and so on. 802 refers to the local area network/mesh network standards and 11 refers to the wireless LAN standard (engineers like numbers:) ) Some one I once worked for wrote the first draft of the 802.11 specification.

The IEEE, which once stood for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, but now just IEEE, is the world’s largest professional organization for the advancement of technology.

This is neat to see the IEEE’s Society on Social Implications of Technology developing a public standard for trust ratings. You can learn more at their web site.

Tiny couple lives in 8 square foot trailer:

The couple, both 30 at the time, decided to trade in their three-bedroom San Francisco home to take up residence in an 8-square-foot TAB Teardrop camper.

Source: As millennials embrace RVs, next wave of travel trailers go hip | kgw.com

The actual dimensions of just the queen size bed inside are 31 square feet. Guess it’s like a Doctor WHO Tardis, bigger on the inside?

Newsweek says Virgin Galactic space plane now travels at twice the speed of light – wow:

“Correction: The headline has been changed to reflect the fact the Virgin Galactic spaceplane flew at twice the speed of sound, not the twice speed of light as previously stated.””

More from “Newsweek”:  this story written by highly creative writer Janice Williams, where almost everything in the lead is wrong.

• Per Wikipedia, Stephen Austin died in 1836 yet Newsweek says he founded the City of Austin 3 years after he died. Amazing guy!
• Texas was part of Mexico until 1836, after which it was an independent republic until joining the US in 1845.
• Newsweek says that 24 years after Austin’s death, he became a leader of a Confederacy that was founded in 1861!
• William Barton is another Confederate leader, per Newsweek. Except he died in 1840, 21 years before the Confederacy was established.

Newsweek based their creative story telling on an original report in the Austin Statesman. The latter reported the story correctly; Newsweek’s reporters and editors lack even elementary school reading ability.

Newsweek is a fictional story service that pretends to report on the news – their journalistic and business failures are self inflicted, says Salon.

Yet they wonder why people call them “fake news” when their reporters and editors act like bumbling fools with the talent of middle school writers.

The way to respond to accusations of fictional news reporting is to double down on accuracy, objectivity and remaining calm. Unfortunately, the news industry continues to harm itself through self destructive behavior typical of middle school drama. This behavior is bewildering.

Powell cited research from Princeton economist Alan Krueger, who conducted a survey and found that 44 percent of men reported that they had taken some form of pain medication the previous day.

Source: Fed’s Powell: Opioids people out of the workforce

Actual study text:

Fully 44 percent of prime age men who were out of the labor force acknowledged taking pain medication on the previous day, although this encompasses a wide range of medications.

Pain medication, per the study, included either prescription or over-the-counter medication, or both

Since this is about opioids:

Nearly two-thirds of those who took pain medication indicated that they took prescription pain medication

and

Thus, on any given day, 31 percent of NLF prime age men take pain medication, most likely an opioid-based medication<

No data is given to support the “most likely an opiod-based medication” claim.

From a claim of “44% of men” down to 31% of prime age men not-in-the-labor-force – or 31% of a very small subset.

Apparently CNBC never read the underlying study, made no attempt to verify the facts or unintentionally or intentionally misconstrued the Fed Chair’s comments. What ever it is, it was terrible reporting.

This “news” works as a propaganda:

1.  It now appears in a major media outlet which will influence others into believing pain medication is so widespread that 44% of working age men are taking prescription pain medications.
2.  It uses an “Appeal to Authority” (Fed Chair)
3.  It uses an “Appeal to Authority” (Princeton economist)
4.  It uses a “Logical fallacy” (lumping prescription and non-prescription medications together in the top line number of 44%)
5. It uses “Lies” by leaving out that this refers to men not in the labor force, rather than all men.

There is a wide spread meme sweeping the nation that opioid deaths care caused primarily by abuse of prescription opioid pain medications. Other studies indicate most deaths are due to synthetic, illegally produced and sold drugs on the street and not those prescribed by doctors.

This “news” report by CNBC feeds this propaganda meme.

Footnotes

A separate table (Table 6) presents different data values saying that 57.7% of men aged 25-54 NLF took pain medication yesterday.

According to Table 8, 76.5% of those taking prescription pain medication were part of Medicaid, Medicare or VA/Tricare. About half were on various disability programs (Workmen’s comp, Social Security, VA, Disability insurance).

Link

The media is putting The Onion out of business!

Text for Indexing

A tape might exist of Trump doing something in an elevator, though exactly where that somewhere is and what that something might be, no one in media can say. That’s because no one in the media seems to have seen the tape – or is even confident it exists

Which is from The Onion?

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