Binh Nguyen's Blog: February 2021

Random Quotes:
- Facebook told workers to ignore fraudulent ads and hacked accounts as long as the company "gets paid," BuzzFeed News reported Thursday.
BuzzFeed News' investigation revealed how Facebook consistently prioritised making money over protecting users from scams, hackers, and disinformation.
Ahead of the US elections in November, Facebook even told its ad reviewers to focus on selling political ads over looking for the ones that broke its rules, according to the report.
Facebook has made repeated promises to crack down on users and advertisers who break its rules, but dozens of reports in recent months have exposed that the company continues to fall short on those promises.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/facebook-reportedly-told-its-ad-reviewers-to-ignore-fraud-and-hacked-accounts-as-long-as-facebook-gets-paid/ar-BB1bQ7FY?pfr=1
- Australian wine is considered among the best in the world, but Beijing has delivered a fresh insult to local producers amid an ongoing trade stoush – saying China only bought the booze because it was "cheap".
A piece in government mouthpiece the Global Times claimed the new trade tariffs – which have devastated the industry with import taxes of up to a staggering 212 per cent – could lead to a wine and grape "glut" in Australia when demand from Chinese importers drops.
The tabloid, which labelled the tariff a "destructive blow", added that Chinese consumers would now look to buy wine from countries like Chile.
"Chinese customers chose Australian wines over those from other sources because they can get the same quality at a cheaper price," wine importer Long Guanya, who bought some 200,000 bottles of Australian wines this year, said from his base in Xiamen.
"It (the new tariffs) will have a huge effect on my business, because after these tariffs, the price will be at least three times higher. I expect that the volume of imported Australian wine will sharply decrease."
https://www.news.com.au/world/asia/china-trade-war-beijing-says-australian-wine-is-cheap-in-latest-insult/news-story/8bcb7d622027407b40e55a395801bf62
- Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest measured the brain activity of family dogs using a technique called electroencephalography, which involved taping electrodes to the animals' heads.
The researchers played the dogs recorded instruction words they knew (such as "sit"), similar but nonsense words ("sut"), and then, very different nonsense words ("bep").
Experts found that dogs, who had not been specifically trained for the experiment, could quickly and clearly tell the difference between the known instruction words and the very different nonsense words.
"The brain activity is different when they listen to the instructions, which they know, and to the very different nonsense words, which means that dogs recognise these words," lead study author Lilla Magyari told CNN.
However, the animals did not pay attention to the small differences between known words and similar-sounding nonsense words.
Instead, the canine study subjects processed them as the same word, Dr Magyari, a postdoctoral researcher at the department of ethology at Eötvös Loránd University, told CNN.
https://www.9news.com.au/world/can-your-dog-understand-you-when-you-speak-to-it/95b31ba5-2bec-4aea-b41f-424b82e4761e
- Vaccines usually take eight to 10 years to develop. Rush development in the US has taken that timeframe and compacted into about six to nine months, cutting corners, using rigged samples of individuals to come up with a high rate of effectiveness, an artificial high rate of effectiveness.
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/12/07/640235/Nobody-should-touch-hazardous-US-vaccines
- Humor is a funny thing. Different people use it in different ways.
I've touched on this topic in some previous blog posts. People with high self-esteem, for example, tend to use humor to build relationships with others. Undertakers, on the other hand, tend not to use it much at all.
Now, a new study from researchers in Chile and Switzerland reveals some of the demographic differences in people's humor styles. The study found that people in different social groups or with different demographic traits seem to use humor slightly differently. No joke!
That conclusion came from looking at how often 1,272 adults in Chile said they used each of eight distinct types of humor.
One takeaway from the findings is that religious people might be a little less funny in general. Overall, people who were religious described using four of the eight types of humor less frequently.
Politics also influenced people's humor preferences. Those with left-wing leanings reported more often employing cynical humor, which mocks common values or features of society, than people with right-wing leanings.
Cynical humor was also more frequently used among people with lower levels of education. On the other hand, wit, which the researchers characterized as quick comments that connect ideas in unexpected ways, was used disproportionately by people with high levels of education.
Older people tended to use six of the eight types of humor less, raising the possibility that maybe life just gets less funny over time.
That said, the researchers were careful to emphasize that in all these cases the differences were relatively small. To put it another way, someone's individual traits will probably say much more about their sense of humor than their sociodemographic characteristics do.
You might ask why we really care who likes what kind of jokes. That's a fair question, but keep in mind that humor can potentially serve important psychological and social purposes. Telling a joke, for example, can help people reframe negative situations in new ways. That suggests that humor might be decidedly serious thing, precisely because it's not serious at all!
https://blog.allpsych.com/the-demographics-of-humor/
- Mr Sin said Mr Choi's alleged transactions coincided with "almost the peak era" of North Korea's missile program. At this time the regime was in possession of short, medium, intermediate and inter-continental range missiles, which could be fitted with both conventional and unconventional warheads, including nuclear.
He said North Korea was also known to be supplying missiles to Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/accused-north-korean-agent-s-missile-diagrams-high-school-level-court-hears-20210204-p56zkl.html

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