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In 1992, 11-year-old Guy Fraser spent his summer vacation fiddling with a radio. He was searching, sometimes in vain, for an English-language broadcast of the Olympics in Barcelona. He was trapped in France. Oblivious to the Olympics and her sons devotion to them Frasers mother had booked a two-week break that coincided almost perfectly with the Games. Fraser was heartbroken, but he made the best of it. He found French broadcasts he could mostly understand as he sussed out how his favourite athletes were faring in Spain.

Nearly three decades later, the Englishman is just as enthusiastic about the Games, especially after more than a year of Covid-19 lockdowns. So in the leadup to Tokyo, he began to do some research. Fraser is an equalopportunity viewer Once you properly understand the rules and tactics, any sport is inherently fascinating, he told the Guardian in an email and he wanted to be as informed as he could be. So he scrolled his phone from his home in Bath perusing rosters, trying to learn a thing or two about the people whod earned spots on teams across the world.

And sometimes, he failed. Sometimes he couldnt find any information at all.

I was surprised by the amount of people listed as competing who didnt have [a Wikipedia page] started yet, Fraser said. I assume the lack of competitions worldwide leading up to the Games meant that a few of the usual markers werent hit. He added: These are fabulous, fantastic athletes at their peak of capabilities and at the peak of human physical achievements, and they deserve recognition and representation.

Before this year, Fraser had dabbled in the wide world of Wikipedia. He believes wholeheartedly in the free online encyclopedia and its force as a social good, and from time to time hed edited or added a page. Now, though, he felt Wikipedia was seriously lacking and he had plenty of time on his hands. Fraser works with children who have autism, and the pandemic had disrupted his professional life and kept him confined to home. He was itching for something to do, and he found it in an internet blind spot. He was going to make sure every single Olympian got a Wikipedia page.

This summer, Fraser pored over pages of results everything from the decathlon to race walking to shot put. He translated text from foreign languages, read interviews, checked and double-checked his work. He doesnt like to code, so every time he finished a page, he flagged it for Wikipedia to finish the job. Since 1 June, he has created 358 pages. In that time, he has also made more than 1,300 edits.

He wrote about Ebba Tulu Chala, a Swedish marathoner who was born in Ethiopia and left as a child refugee, and Elija Godwin, a US runner who was impaled by a javelin in 2019. Then theres Alice Mason, a distance runner and doctor from New Zealand who paused her Olympic training during the pandemic to work at an urgent care centre, and Andrew Coscoran, an Irish middle-distance runner who was suspended from the Florida State college team for breaking curfew. Fraser doesnt discriminate between good deeds and bad. His goal is pure information, and the facts he knows about his athletes could fill a novella. Over the course of his research, he learned about photography and the Atlanta Falcons, Freibergs disease, the Republic of Kiribati, knee injuries, immigration and the optic nerve. If you have to trawl through a few Belarusian hammer throwers to find the great stories, Fraser said, so be it.

As he gathered information and parsed it into readable narratives, Fraser found himself pulling for people he researched. The more he knew about where theyd come from and what obstacles theyd faced, the more certain he became about their chances to win it all. Hes still waiting for one of his athletes to take gold.

When Fraser told his friends what he was working on, several were amused. His girlfriend is puzzled by the exercise, which ate up hours of his summer, but that doesnt faze him. At least Im being quiet, he says. Its as harmless a hobby as you get.

More than 10 million people across the world have registered to create and edit Wikipedia pages since the site went online in 2001. Exactly 199 of them have created more than 20,000 pages; the busiest creator had made 895,445 pages as of Thursday, way north of Frasers total. Still, he ranks in the top 1% of creators and hes done the bulk of his work this summer.

A week into the Games, Fraser is still plugging away with his pages on the English language version of the site. He has more to do hes not certain how many, exactly, but he wont rest until the 11,656 athletes are all enshrined in the online encyclopedia (he is helped by the fact that the vast majority of them already had pages). On Thursday, he watched BMX and learned that one of the Latvian competitors has also competed in bobsled events. On Friday, he turned his attention to track and field, working his way down the roster of entrants in the 100m dash. And hes not just creating pages; hes also making sure every runner who logs a personal best time gets an edit to document it. In the process, he discovered that Maggie Barrie, a sprinter from Sierra Leone, had been entered in the wrong race because of an administrative error. It was yet another story to file away, a page edit, on his way toward what, exactly? Recognition? Page views? The honour of creating a page for an underdog-turned-medallist?

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But Fraser isnt concerned with any of that; he says he set out on this quest without a goal. There was no endpoint, because the concept of an ending is totally at odds with Wikipedia.

Theyre never finished, he says of his pages. You cant ever say all the information has been found. People will continue to build and improve and tweak and add. Its a great community; when you make a mistake, before you awake the next day someone youll never meet anonymously on the other side of the world fixes it. Its incredibly lifeaffirming and provides a bit of faith in humanity.

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There are 11,656 athletes at the Olympics. Guy Fraser wanted them all on Wikipedia - The Guardian

Heppenheim/Hamburg (DPA) Spectators and stargazers can expect fireworks: the stars falling by the hundreds on the Perseids Islands can be seen in the night sky in the first half of August.

And the conditions for the scene are good as long as the weather lasts all this summer, which so far has been fairly mixed. The conditions are particularly favorable this year, because the moon sets late in the evening, says the Association of Friends of the Stars in Germany. This means that its light will not illuminate the night sky and will not disturb the view of dying cosmic dust particles. Under optimal conditions, you could see a meteor rushing across the sky every minute or two.

According to Sternfreunde, the peak of the meteor stream is expected on the nights of August 12 and 13. If you then look east in a clear sky after midnight, you can see dozens of stars falling per hour. But even on the weekends before and after you can see the glowing particles.

The Perseids appear to come from the constellation of Perseus, but its the debris cloud from Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle that floods Earth every year in its orbit around the Sun. According to Astronomical Friends, the comet was independently discovered by Louis Swift and Horace Tuttle on July 19, 1862, and it takes about 133 years to complete one orbit around the Sun. The next time it should be visible from Earth is in the year 2126.

According to the Hamburg Planetarium, what burns up in Earths atmosphere are the crumbs of a comet that it loses in its orbit. Each August, Earth crosses this cosmic debris path, and comet particles fall into the atmosphere like raindrops on a car window. Then they burn up to 100 to 80 kilometers above the Earths surface. Some particles are bright enough to be seen even in the interfering light of large cities. However, the planetarium advises you to go to a dark place without disturbing the light and also to be patient. Falling stars will likely come in bursts, and the eyes will have to get used to the darkness of the night.

dpa-infocom, dpa: 210805-99-714652 / 2

Alcohol buff. Troublemaker. Introvert. Student. Social media lover. Web ninja. Bacon fan. Reader.

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Science - Fireworks of the cosmic parts - Perseids burning in the sky - Wikipedia - The Weston Forum

My great-uncle Walter Scott worked for the Guardian as a foreign affairs subeditor from 1916 to his retirement in 1963 aged 88 (The changing art of the subeditor: You had to read the type upside down, 2 August). He was due to retire in 1939, just as war broke out, and younger men in the office enlisted.

A small team under the leadership of EA Montague vowed to continue printing and distributing the paper throughout the war, even if the country came under enemy occupation. On 9 July 1940, Walter received a memo saying that in the event of an invasion of Britain, he would be notified by a secret code. The message would read: Private and confidential, not for publication sortie 03.30 hours. If he received this, Walter was instructed to immediately notify all war correspondents around the world, as their lives would be endangered.

A particular friend of Walters was James Bone (London editor of the Manchester Guardian, 1912-45). He frequently invited Walter for weekends at his country cottage, Abbots Holt, in Tilford, Surrey. At his retirement dinner, Bone made a speech paying tribute to the people he worked with and said and the great Walter, who has carried so much of the London end on his shoulders. He has borne with me so patiently for so long and I fear I have not benefited as I should from his kindly admonitions. The last note from James to Walter, dated 6 September 1959, asks: [Do you] like the Guardians new name? Its the penalty that Manchester had to pay the world!

Walters services were needed as he was the go-to person for knowledge of foreign affairs. The management were concerned for his wellbeing and sent the following note: KAS [the office manager] says that he is quite content so long as we tell Walter Scott in writing that he has complete freedom to stay away in bad weather or whenever he feels slightly below par.

Walters command and memory of foreign affairs meant he was consulted long into his retirement; he was their Wikipedia.Anita ScottFarnham, Surrey

Have an opinion on anything youve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication.

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Walter Scott, the 88-year-old Guardian subeditor who was a walking Wikipedia - The Guardian

Fast-food chain Quiznos partnered with Intercontinental Exchange Inc (NYSE:ICE)-owned cryptocurrency financial services platform Bakkt to start acceptingBitcoin(CRYPTO: BTC) for sandwiches at select Denver locations.

What Happened:According to a Wednesday Coindeskreport, Quiznos locations including the one located at the high-traffic Denver airport will start accepting Bitcoin in mid-August.

Customers who download the Bakkt mobile application and pay with the coin,will receive a $15 reward in Bitcoin.

Bakkt Chief Revenue Officer Sheela Zemlin said that the company wouldpay close attention to how this pilot program performs and considers expanding it "to additional Quiznos locations across the country."

The firm has been actively recruiting retail chains for some timeand recently alsoannouncedthat its users wouldbe able to pay at more than a million Cantaloupe retail devices with Bitcoin as well.

President of Quiznos parent company REGO Restaurant Group Mark Lohmann said that he appreciates that the partnership allows his firm to accept bitcoin directly at the point of sale." He believes that this is also an answer to "mobile and millennial consumer demand for alternative and cryptocurrency payment options."

Price Action:According to CoinMarketCapdata, Bitcoin is now trading at $39,398after gaining 3.09% of value over the last 24 hours. The current price is 40% down from midApril's high of over $64,000, but also 66% higher than late-July's low of under $23,150.

Photo:Salmonpepperricevia Wikipedia

2021 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Quiznos Fast-Food Chain Partners With Bakkt To Accept Bitcoin For Sandwiches - Benzinga - Benzinga

Much as his predecessors warned Americans against tobacco and opioid abuse, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a formal advisory last Thursday that misinformationsuch as the widespread propaganda now sowing doubts about coronavirus vaccines on social mediais an urgent threat to public health. It is, but the discussion soured quickly. After President Joe Biden said social-media platforms that turn users against vaccines are killing people, an anonymous Facebook official told CNN that the White House is looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals. When Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the White House is flagging problematic posts for Facebook, conservatives and Twitter contrarians inferred that the government was telling the company to censor people. The journalist Glenn Greenwald described the effort as fascism.

Greenwald and Facebook are minimizing a genuine problem: An infodemic involving the viral spread of misinformation, as well as the mingling of facts with half-truths and falsehoods in a fractured media environmenthas compounded the COVID-19 pandemic. But critics of Murthys initiative and Bidens comments are right about one thing: The official health establishment has made the infodemic worse through its own inability to cope with conflicting scientific views. In the early days of the pandemic, experts at the World Health Organization, CDC Director Robert Redfield, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, and thenSurgeon General Jerome Adams discouraged mask wearing and only belatedly reversed course; some of the same voices later pooh-poohed the notion that the coronavirus first began spreading after escaping from a Chinese research laba possibility now being taken far more seriously.

Daniel Engber: Dont fall for these lab-leak traps

Anti-vaccination propagandists and social-media provocateurs alike have exploited these missteps to great effect; even those inclined to trust the government have lost some confidence in official pronouncements. If the Biden administration hopes to reverse that, it should ask itself: What could the CDC do differently if the lab-leak hypothesis first surfaced today?

What the United States needs if it hopes to combat misinformation is a better system for communicating with the publica system that keeps up with continuous changes in scientific knowledge; that incorporates expertise from people in a variety of fields, not just those anointed with official titles at well-known institutions; and that weaves dissenting perspectives into a larger narrative without overemphasizing them.

Fortunately, the internet has produced a model for this approach: Wikipedia. The crowdsourced reference site is the simplest, most succinct summary of the current state of knowledge on almost any subject you can imagine. If an agency such as the CDC launched a health-information site, and gave a community of hundreds or thousands of knowledgeable people the ability to edit it, the outcome would be far more complete and up-to-date than individual press releases. The same modeltapping distributed expertise rather than relying on institutional authoritycould be useful for other government agencies that find themselves confronting rumors.

Rene DiResta: Virus experts arent getting the message out

The idea of making government websites more like Wikipedia may sound far-fetched, even comical. People of a certain agepeople such as meremember our teachers telling us, Wikipedia is not a source! And yet, over two decades, Wikipedia has flourished. Though perhaps still not citable for academic work, the site provides reliable, up-to-date information about millions of topics, backed by robust sourcing. And it meets the needs of the moment: the incorporation of a wide swath of voices; transparency about who is saying what; and a clear accounting, via the Talk page accompanying each entry, of every change to the consensus narrative.

An officially sanctioned but broadly sourced version of Wikipedia for health matters could also serve as a robust resource for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social-media companies to point their users to. Tech platforms are currently expected to counter misinformation by amplifying authoritative sources, but they are also aware that simply linking to the CDCs and WHOs official sites is not resonating with many audiences. When internet users show that they trust crowdsourced information more than any one agencys pronouncements, figuring out how to generate the best crowdsourced information possible is a matter of urgency.

As a researcher, I study misinformation, but Im also concerned about threats to freedom of expression. Although health misinformation can cause significant harm to communities, heavy-handed content moderationeven when intended to limit that harmexacerbates deep distrust and fears of censorship. Knowledge evolves. New facts should change peoples minds. Sometimesas with masksthe loudest calls to reconsider the prevailing consensus come from those outside of government.

Murthys advisory recognizes this: It is important to be careful and avoid conflating controversial or unorthodox claims with misinformation, he writes. Transparency, humility, and a commitment to open scientific inquiry are critical. Forthrightly acknowledging that consensus does change and that, at key moments, the government does not yet know all the facts might help rebuild the publics trust; at a minimum, it might minimize the impact of the tedious Gotcha! tweets that present two seemingly conflicting headlines as evidence of wholesale expert, media, and government incompetence.

Rene DiResta: The anti-vaccine influencers who are merely asking questions

Wikipedia, with its army of 97,000 volunteers contributing to COVID-related pages, has already been forced to confront the challenges of the lab-leak hypothesisan emblematic example of the challenge of trying to fact-check online information when scientific consensus is in flux or has not yet formed. The Talk page linked to the Wikipedia entry on the origin of the coronavirus provides visibility into the roiling editing wars. Sock-puppet accounts descended, trying to nudge the coverage of the topic to reflect particular points of view. A separate page was created, dedicated specifically to the COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis, but site administrators later deleted ita decision that remains in dispute within the Wikipedia community. The Talk pages for some pandemic-related entries have been labeled with one of the sites standard warnings: There have been attempts to recruit editors of specific viewpoints to this article. If youve come here in response to such recruitment, please review the relevant Wikipedia policy on recruitment of editors, as well as the neutral point of view policy. Disputes on Wikipedia are resolved by consensus, not by majority vote.

On June 17, the sites supreme court, the Arbitration Committee, made the decision to place COVID-19 pages under discretionary sanctions, a rubric that involves a higher standard of administrator oversight and greater friction in the editing process, and is in place for other topics such as abortion, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Falun Gong. But the point is that Wikipedia has developed a consistent framework to handle these turbulent topics. The site has clearly articulated guidelines to foster the incorporation of the most accurate information and provide visibility into exactly how the current version of any entry came about. These are significant achievements.

Maintaining and expanding the site requires countless hours of volunteer labor. Because laypeople may not be able evaluate the significance of highly technical scientific findings, a Wikipedia-style communications model for government would require tapping a variety of reputable contributors, including people outside of government, as initial authors or editors, who would then invite others to join the effort, perhaps for a set term. The editorial conversationsthe process of mediating consensuswould be viewable by everyone, so allegations of backroom dealing would not be credible.

Ultimately, Wikipedia remains a platform on which consensus develops in full public view. In fact, some other platformsincluding YouTubechose to point to Wikipedia quite prominently beginning in 2018, in efforts to direct people toward reliable information as they watched videos discussing various conspiracy theories, such as one about the 1969 moon landing. Wikipedia is regularly the top link in search results, suggesting that internet users rely on it even though they understand the limitations of a source writtenand constantly rewrittenby pseudonymous volunteer authors. During the pandemic, platforms have struggled to decide which posts are misinformation and how to direct users to authoritative sources. A Wikipedia-style deployment of distributed expertise and transparent history is promising regardless of whether were talking about how a novel coronavirus spreads or what happened to some ballots in a dumpster or what really transpired in the latest viral protest video.

Although Biden blamed Facebook and other social-media platforms for the spread of misinformation, Murthys advisory offers useful advice to everyone in the media ecosystem. Limiting the spread, he declares, is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole-of-society effort. Physicians can use social media themselves, to counter bad information with good. Journalists can avoid publishing clickbait headlines and more carefully evaluate studies that have yet to be peer-reviewed. Tech platforms can redesign algorithms and product features to surface reliable information about health. And individual social-media users can think before they share things online.

The surgeon generals exhorting ordinary Americans to do their part in stopping viral misinformation is a remarkable acknowledgement that, in the modern information environment, the distribution of power has shifted. The unfortunate irony is that a surgeon generals advisory may not break through the noiseor may immediately become fodder in a roiling, unending online battle.

Public officials who hope to solve problems in this environment need to be willing to try new tacticsand not just on matters of health. Any message that agencies put before citizens will be richer if shaped by processes that account for the changed relationship between fact and opinion, between expertise and influence, and between the public and its leaders.

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The CDC Should Be More Like Wikipedia - The Atlantic