#Data Source Tracking

[jadeannbyrne]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Jade Ann Byrne Survives Earthquake in California: A Firsthand Account of Resilience and Community Data Collaboration Riverside, CA — July 29, 2024 — Jade Ann Byrne, a celebrated tech-savvy eGirl, multifaceted professional, and community advocate, has once again showcased her resilience and commitment to the greater social good. At exactly 1:00 PM California Mean Time, a…

[artisticdivasworld]

The Power of Data Analysis and Integration for Your Business: Why You Need to Start Now

To keep your trucking business financially healthy, it’s crucial to track revenue and expenses accurately. Data analysis helps you monitor income from various brokers and customers, and keep a close eye on every cent of your expenses. By integrating financial data from multiple sources, you get a clear picture of your cash flow, enabling you to make smart decisions. We touched on this topic once…

[reasonsforhope]

"Eavesdropping on whale songs over the last six years is providing new information vital to answering questions about these giants of the ocean.

The number of whale songs detected is associated with shifting food sources, according to the California scientists—and the number of days humpbacks have been singing has nearly doubled.

When monitoring baleen whale songs in the Pacific Ocean, researchers found year-to-year variations correlated with changes in the availability of the species they forage on.

In vast oceans, monitoring populations of large marine animals can be a “major challenge” for ecologists, explained Dr. John Ryan, a biological oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California (MBARI).

Their team deployed underwater microphones called hydrophones to study and track baleen whales, which communicate over long distances through sound.

“Surprisingly, the acoustic behavior of baleen whales provides insights about which species can better adapt to changing ocean conditions,” said Dr. Ryan, a lead author of the study.

They also monitored songs from blue, fin, and humpback whales off the West Coast of the U.S. to see what the song data could reveal about the health of their ecosystem.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS One, showed “large” year-to-year variations in whale song detection.

“The amount of humpback whale song continually increased, with their songs being detected on 34% of days at the beginning of the study and rising to 76% of days after six years,” said Dr. Ryan.

“These increases consistently tracked improved foraging conditions for humpback whales across all study years—large increases in krill abundance, followed by large increases in anchovy abundance.

“In contrast, blue and fin whale song rose primarily during the years of increasing krill abundance.

“This distinction of humpback whales is consistent with their ability to switch between dominant prey. An analysis of skin biopsy samples confirmed that changes had occurred in the whales’ diets.”

He explained that other factors, including the local abundance of whales, may have contributed to patterns in song detections observed in some years, but changes in foraging conditions were the most consistent factor.

“Overall, the study indicates that seasonal and annual changes in the amount of baleen whale song detected may mirror shifts in the local food web.”

WHALES ON THE COMEBACK TRAIL: • Gray Whale, Extinct for Centuries in Atlantic, Is Spotted in Cape Cod • Sighting of Many Blue Whales Around Seychelles is First in Decades – ‘Phenomenal’ • Majestic Sei Whales Reappear in Argentine Waters After Nearly a Century

“The results suggest that an understanding of the relationship between whale song detection and food availability may help researchers to interpret future hydrophone data, both for scientific research and whale management efforts”, which could better protect endangered species."

-via Good News Network, March 1, 2025

[hkthatgffan]

The image used in the background of the Gravity Falls logo HAS BEEN FOUND!!

It's located in France!!

I made a thread on Twitter explaining the full story and how I even asked Ian Worrel and Alex Hirsch about it, but lemme run down quickly how it was found and where it is!

After 3 years of searching with some friends on and off, we had no real luck. I've been working on a video about it for a while but decided to try one more time. My friend @trickengf suggested looking at international logos as they may have more of the image available and sure enough...we found logos like the Japanese and Russian GF logo had more visible detail of the image.

From that, Tricken made a remake of the image and used it to find it. He ended up finding the source at about 3AM for me, lol!

My friend Fried Oreos then confirmed the image was old enough to fit the criteria of pre GF pilot, by determining the image was on the Textures website it was sourced from since 2008!

Then, my friend Alex M managed to buy the HD image and we were able to analyze its metadata for more info!

Turns out, the image, called "LandscapeMountains0009," was taken by a Nikon D70 camera on April 18, 2007!

THE GRAVITY FALLS LOGO IMAGE IS ALMOST 18 YEARS OLD!!

From there, we began looking for the location. The meta data had no location, but other images taken around the same time showed signs of maybe the location being in Europe.

After over a day of searching, Tricken, Alex M and Oreos FOUND IT!!

The location of the image is a mountain range near the town of Sers, France...near the border with Spain.

Exact coordinates of the closest viewable angle of the image is 42°54'23.2"N 0°06'05.6"E

This is a major discovery and one I cannot believe we did. While this search was started by me in 2021 with some friends, it was TrickenGF, Alex M and Fried Oreos who deserve all the credit for this discovery! They were the geniuses who tracked all of this down and were able to connect the dots to get to this point.

You guys are amazing and I am beyond grateful for all of this.

Finding this image means that fans can now recreate the Gravity Falls logo as they want with anything they want. For example, Tricken made this for me using the image :D

Or, you can do this, lol

We now have it!

For 12 years as we looked at the Gravity Falls logo...we were in reality looking at a mountain in France...NOT Oregon!

So, I guess this is a major W for France but sorry, Pacific Northwest, Gravity Falls is actually French, lol!

I still can't believe we found this. I'm so happy :P

[iidsch]

prev post because I just remembered about this but every day of my life I am so thankful for being a mp3 downloader girl because there's this vaporware album that I adore and one day it completely disappeared from the Internet and I would not be able to listen to it anymore if it wasn't because I downloaded it as soon as I found it. It's not even the only time this has happened to me either like videos get made private on youtube more often than you think and many websites, files and links die every day without anyone noticing. Your stuff is not safe on the Internet and it's genuinely astonishing that so many people don't use their PC storage and instead rely on apps

[atompowers]

📈 10 Resources to Track Renewable Energy Data So You're Never Behind Our Accelerating Clean Energy Future

[mythalism]

i know everyone is really excited for the oblivion remake because i was too. oblivion was the first real video game i ever played when i was a kid, and is literally the reason i am a gamer today, but BDS has called for a microsoft boycott, and that includes anything made by bethesda.

this isn't just a "oh they have some obscure business partnerships in isr*el" or "oh they donate to this or that lobby" sort of boycott either, although those are important too. my tone is not meant to be flippant about them, but rather i want to emphasize the gravity of how microsoft directly and deliberately contributes to the palestinian death toll daily, in a way that is uniquely cruel and complicit.

microsoft has had a $35 million dollar contract with the isr*eli military since 2002. they provide cloud storage for surveillance data of gazan civillians, and an artificial intelligence program called a "mass assassination factory" to assist in planning and targeting their attacks, many of which are on civilians or involve mass civilian casualties.

microsoft's service agreements with the isr*eli military also includes the CPU responsible for the military's tech infrastructure, military intelligence units that develop spy technology used against palestinians and lebanese, the maintenance of the palestinian population registry that tracks and (illegally) limits the movement of palestinains in the west bank and gaza, their air force targeting database, and much more. they work closely with isr*eli military intelligence agencies on surveillance systems used to monitor palestians, provide specialized consulting, technical and engineering support, hosts training software for the IOF, provide financial support to organizations based in the illegally occupied west bank, and have repeatedly invested in isr*eli start ups specializing in war technology.

in 2020, internal and external pressure forced microsoft to pull out of its 74 million dollar investment in an isr*eli company that violated international law due to its use of facial recognition technology for military surveillance.

in 2021, microsoft signed a new, 3-year contract with the isr*eli ministry of defense worth $133 million dollars. the isr*eli military is microsoft's second largest military customer. the first? the united states.

you can read more (w/ sources) about microsoft's complicity here.

BDS asks us to boycott microsoft products whenever possible.

microsoft is directly complicit in countless isr*eli war crimes, and the money you provide them will further proliferate this violence. i know the oblivion remake was exciting, but please, consider the lives of palestinians above your own nostalgia. no one is free until everyone is free.

[ms-demeanor]

probably not a good sign that i couldn't talk about work at the con this weekend without crying a little and that I had to force myself to leave my laptop at home so i couldn't do work and leaving my laptop at home made me feel a little panicky and also now i kind of want to throw up instead of going to work tomorrow.

I'm so overloaded that I've become completely ineffective, I've got so many projects that none of them are getting done, fucked up tracking time a couple weeks ago and missed twenty or so hours on my paycheck and am feeling so fried that I am struggling to muster up the energy to fix it (i shouldn't have missed that many hours anyway i'm hourly there's supposed to be a clock system for me but there isn't the time tracking is supposed to be for metrics not for how i get paid and now i have to dump time into fixing that)

there is a repository of business information that lives ONLY on my computer (my personal computer, because I do not have a work computer) that needs to get uploaded to our documentation system but the configs exported from one system as PDFs but can't be uploaded to the other as PDF so I need to open each one and save it in word so I can upload them individually because the system can take word docs but not PDFs

I need to finish creating the spreadsheet of standard hardware and put specifications and part numbers and standard costs on it but I need to meet with the networking team lead so we can go over spec for the networking equipment because the standards are new to both of us and I need to know what he's looking for if one of the standards are out of stock and he needs to learn the abbreviation/part number system for that particular vendor so i need to teach it to him and until we're on the same page I can't finish my hardware standards project

I need to create a guide for the practice leads to reach out to vendors in their relevant practices because right now I'm the one who reaches out so I'm the one who has the meetings about spec quotes and nobody else knows who to call or where to submit a consultation request

I need to create a guide for the techs to source hardware and figure out part numbers and compare specs

i need to quote two printer options for a client

i need to email the vendor about the mis-applied warranty and have it corrected to the appropriate device

i need to get uptime data on eight servers collected for the bimonthly client meeting

i need to call microsoft to get access to a tenant for a user we never should have sold licenses to

i need to check tracking and update the order spreadsheet

i need to export the list of firewalls from one vendor and sort it by active clients and sort it by the ones that need to be replaced because they're EOL and then the ones that need to be renewed and then the ones that aren't on fire that we can consider replacing in two years

I need to look at the list of servers and sort by drive type and get the drive part numbers so that I can get spares to all the clients

of those things, I think I've got tickets for two or three of them. The other forty five tickets I have are unrelated to this task list.

[stellophiliac]

how to build a digital music collection and stuff

spotify sucks aaaass. so start downloading shit!!

file format glossary

.wav is highest quality and biggest

.mp3 is very small, but uses lossy compression which means it's lower quality

.flac is smaller than .wav, but uses lossless compression so it's high quality

.m4a is an audio file format that apple uses. that's all i really know

downloading the music

doubledouble.top is a life saver. you can download from a variety of services including but not limited to apple music, spotify, soundcloud, tidal, deezer, etc.

i'd recommend ripping your music from tidal or apple music since they're the best quality (i think apple music gives you lossless audio anyway. .m4a can be both lossy and lossless, but from the text on doubledouble i assume they're ripping HQ files off apple music)

i also love love love cobalt.tools for ripping audio/video from youtube (they support a lot of other platforms too!)

of course, many artists have their music on bandcamp — purchase or download directly from them if you can. bandcamp offers a variety of file formats for download

file conversion

if you're downloading from apple music with doubledouble, it spits out an .m4a file.

.m4a is ok for some people but if you prefer .flac, you may wanna convert it. ffmpeg is a CLI (terminal) tool to help with media conversion

if you're on linux or macOS, you can use parameter expansion to batch convert all files in a folder. put the files in one place first, then with your terminal, cd into the directory and run:

for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.flac"; done

this converts from .m4a to .flac — change the file extensions if needed.

soulseek

another way to get music is through soulseek. soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network which is mainly used for music. nicotine+ is a pretty intuitive (and open-source) client if you don't like the official one.

you can probably find a better tutorial on soulseek somewhere else. just wanted to make this option known

it's bad etiquette to download from people without sharing files of your own, so make sure you've got something shared. also try to avoid queuing up more than 1-2 albums from one person in a row

tagging & organizing your music

tagging: adding metadata to a music file (eg. song name, artist name, album) that music players can recognize and display

if you've ripped music from a streaming platform, chances are it's already tagged. i've gotten files with slightly incorrect tags from doubledouble though, so if you care about that then you might wanna look into it

i use musicbrainz picard for my tagging. they've got pretty extensive documentation, which will probably be more useful than me

basically, you can look up album data from an online database into the program, and then match each track with its file. the program will tag each file correctly for you (there's also options for renaming the file according to a certain structure if you're into that!)

there's also beets, which is a CLI tool for... a lot of music collection management stuff. i haven't really used it myself, but if you feel up to it then they've got extensive documentation too. for most people, though, it's not really a necessity

how you wanna organize your music is completely up to you. my preferred filestructure is:

artist > album > track # track

using a music player

the options for this are pretty expansive. commonly used players i see include VLC, foobar2000, clementine (or a fork of it called strawberry), and cmus (for the terminal)

you can also totally use iTunes or something. i don't know what audio players other systems come with

i personally use dopamine. it's a little bit slow, but it's got a nice UI and is themeable plus has last.fm support (!!!)

don't let the github page fool you, you don't have to build from source. you can find the releases here

click the "assets" dropdown on the most recent release, and download whichever one is compatible with your OS

syncing

if you're fine with your files just being on one device (perhaps your computer, but perhaps also an USB drive or an mp3 player), you don't have to do this

you can sync with something like google drive, but i hate google more than i hate spotify

you can get a free nextcloud account from one of their providers with 2GB of free storage. you can use webDAV to access your files from an app on your phone or other device (documents by readdle has webDAV support, which is what i use)

disroot and blahaj.land are a couple providers i know that offer other services as well as nextcloud (so you get more with your account), but accounts are manually approved. do give them a look though!!

if you're tech-savvy and have an unused machine lying around, look into self-hosting your own nextcloud, or better yet, your own media server. i've heard that navidrome is a pretty good audio server. i unfortunately don't have experience with self-hosting at the moment so i have like zero advice to give here. yunohost seems to be a really easy way to manage a server

afterword

i don't know if any of this is helpful, but i just wanted to consolidate my personal advice in one place. fuck big tech. own your media, they could take it away from you at any moment

[szhmidty]

Microsoft made Recall—the feature that automatically tracks everything you do in an attempt at helping you except, you know, that's a massive security risk and data mining source—a dependency for the windows file explorer, meaning even if you forcibly strip Recall out you end up losing basic tools.

This is very much a "learn how to install Linux Mint on your laptop" moment. Richard Stallman et al were entirely correct, your computer will soon have spyware integrated deep into the system internals with no ability to cleanly remove it even for experienced, tech savvy users.

Yes, it sucks, there is no Linux distribution that has to even close to the level of support for software and peripherals that windows has, and even the easier distros like Mint still expect a level of tech savvy that Mac and Windows just don't require. Anyone telling you that Linux is just as easy and just as good is lying to you.

But Linux has never been easier, has never been as well supported as today, and simply doesn't contain egregious spyware (well, besides Ubuntu that one time I guess).

[cognitivejustice]

Firstly, the researchers removed the phones’ batteries and replaced them with external power sources to reduce the risk of chemical leakage into the environment, a ScienceDaily report explains. 

Then, four phones were connected together, fitted with 3D-printed casings and holders, and turned into a working prototype ready to be reused.

“Innovation often begins not with something new, but with a new way of thinking about the old, re-imagining its role in shaping the future,” says Huber Flores, Associate Professor of Pervasive Computing at the University of Tartu in Estonia.  

The prototype created by researchers was put to use underwater, where it participated in the monitoring of marine life by helping to count different sea species. 

Normally, these kinds of tasks require a scuba diver to record video and bring it to the surface for analysis. The prototype meant the whole process could be done automatically underwater.

And there are many other ways that a phone’s capacity to efficiently process and store data can be put to good use after its WhatsApping days are done.

These mini data centres could also be used at bus stops, for example, to collect real-time data on the number of passengers. This could help to optimise public transportation networks.

Such smartphone repurposing is just a drop in the ocean of issues that natural resource mining, energy-intensive production and e-waste present. Ultimately, we need to challenge this throwaway culture and move to a more circular model. 

[oneofthosecrazycatladies]

This post is my attempt to track what’s going on with US politics. This post is constantly being updated so if you see this on your dash, check my blog (this post will be pinned) to see the latest version. If there’s anything I miss that you think should be included on this list, please let me know.

January-May 2025

June 2025

National News

Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has a bleak message for us all [x]

Trump has asked Congress to cut funding for public broadcasting [x]

Trump wants to deny visas to foreign students coming to study at Harvard [x]

Trump has issued a travel ban for 12 countries [x]

White House revokes guidance requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortions [x]

Supreme Court allows DOGE to access Social Security data [x]

Pete Hegseth orders the removal of the name of the USS Harvey Milk [x]

RFK Jr has gotten rid of the CDC’s panel of vaccine experts [x]

Trump says he plans to phase out FEMA after 2025 hurricane season [x]

Trump says he's restoring the original Confederate names of several Army bases [x]

Trump is considering adding 36 more countries to travel ban [x]

Judge deems Trump's cuts to National Institutes of Health illegal [x]

The EPA is telling staff to stop policing oil and gas companies [x]

Trump is granting another extension on the TikTok ban [x]

Appeals court says Trump can keep control of California National Guard troops [x]

The Department of Veterans Affairs has said that VA doctors are now allowed to discriminate against patients based on political beliefs and marital status [x]

Federal judge indefinitely blocks Trump administration from cutting off Harvard’s ability to host foreign students [x]

Trump ordered strikes on Iran [x]

The Trump administration is trying to bring back asbestos [x]

State News

Trump is cutting federal funding for California [x]

Trump deployed the National Guard after unrest in Los Angeles [x]

Democratic state politician and husband shot dead in targeted attack in Minnesota [x]

Louisiana's Ten Commandments law in public schools blocked by federal appeals court [x]

Other News

The legacy of DOGE [x]

Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) was handcuffed and forcibly removed during a news conference with Kristi Noem [x]

CORRUPDATE: Trump has created a mobile phone company [x]

Alright I know that we’re all tired. We’re 5 months into this now and it can be really tempting to just check out. To be honest, I did that a lot in May. And what I realized from doing that is, yeah, checking out felt nice, but the bad things still kept happening.

Remember, Trump and his cronies want us to stop paying attention. Because if we’re not paying attention, then we’re not fighting back and they can keep getting away with destroying our country and enriching themselves in the process.

You don’t need to spend every waking second of your day thinking about the news. But what I do ask is that, if you see a story from a credible news source about the corruption or more cuts to programs or problems that are starting to reverberate out from previous actions, please share it. Don’t just look at it and move on. Share it.

Fighting back only works if we all do it together. Remember that our communities are our strength.

[heritageposts]

[...] During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all. Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

In case you didn't catch that: the IOF made an automated system that intentionally marks entire families as targets for bombings, and then they called it "Where's Daddy."

Like what is there even to say anymore? It's so depraved you almost think you have to be misreading it...

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.” The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.  In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.” In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

. . . continues on +972 Magazine (3 Apr 2024)

[sunarryn]

DP X Marvel #25

Danny Fenton hadn’t meant to punch Captain America in the face. In fact, he’d spent the better part of the week trying not to punch anyone, despite the rapidly growing laundry list of reasons to lose his cool—like not sleeping for seventy-two hours because Technus decided to merge his data with every Bluetooth speaker in the tri-state area, or the GIW tracking his every move again, or that weird, suspicious portal energy he kept picking up from somewhere labeled Stark Tower. Danny was running on fumes, ghostly adrenaline, and one too many Red Bulls when it happened. Really, the stars aligned perfectly for an international incident.

He’d only been in New York for six hours, trying to find the source of the energy spike without alerting every superhero on the block—because the last thing he needed was to get into it with the Avengers. Again. The last time had involved Hulk trying to punch a ghost and failing miserably, Thor throwing Mjölnir into the Ghost Zone, and Iron Man demanding to know if ectoplasm was FDA approved. It was a whole thing.

Danny was crouched on the rooftop of some high-rise, scanning with a modified Fenton Specter-Tracker, eyes bloodshot and twitching slightly. He hadn’t slept since Monday. It was Thursday.

“Hey, kid,” came a voice behind him, calm but firm.

Danny spun like a feral cat, eyes glowing, hair frizzed out with ghost static. He registered the silhouette of a man—tall, broad-shouldered, carrying a star-shaped shield—and his brain went danger. Ghost hunter? No. GIW agent? No. Super-soldier-hydra-time-travel-experiment?

He didn’t even process it. He just swung.

There was a crack like a thunderclap, followed by the very human sound of pain—a grunt that broke mid-voice like it had surprised the man himself. Captain Steve Rogers staggered back, hand pressed to his jaw, blinking stars out of his vision and trying to comprehend the fact that someone had just hit him hard enough to make him feel it. Not just feel it—wince. His serum-enhanced, war-hardened, literally-punched-by-Thor-once jaw hurt.

Danny stood frozen, fist still outstretched, pupils blown wide in horror.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. I just punched Captain America. I just decked the star-spangled man with a plan. I am so sorry—I thought you were a ghost! Or like—a time-traveling war criminal! Wait, that’s redundant—”

“Okay, wow,” Steve mumbled, touching his jaw again. “That’s definitely gonna bruise.”

Danny looked like he was about to combust. “Why were you behind me like that?! Who just materializes out of nowhere and says ‘hey, kid’ in the middle of a rooftop stakeout?! I thought I was being ambushed!”

Steve blinked. “I was asking for directions.”

Danny gasped. “You were WHAT?”

Steve looked sheepish. “Tony dropped me off on the wrong building. Said, and I quote, ‘GPS is for cowards.’ I’ve been circling the same three blocks for twenty minutes.”

Danny stared. “Captain America got lost and asked a sleep-deprived half-ghost teenager for directions?”

“I didn’t know you were a sleep-deprived half-ghost teenager,” Steve said defensively. “You looked… competent. Specter-tracker aside.”

Danny made a strangled noise and sat down hard, face buried in his hands. “I’m going to be assassinated by your PR team.”

Steve rubbed his jaw again. “You’re stronger than you look.”

“That is not the point here!”

“No, seriously,” Steve insisted, kneeling down. “That punch? I’ve taken hits from Thanos. You rattled me.”

Danny peeked through his fingers. “Are you flirting with me?”

“What? No!”

“You’re complimenting my punch like it’s a pickup line.”

“I’m—okay, no. You’re a kid.”

“I’m nineteen!”

Steve squinted. “You look like you’ve been through five timelines and one midlife crisis.”

“I have!” Danny wailed. “Do you know what it’s like to babysit the entire ghost population of the afterlife and then accidentally elbow Thor in the ribs during a training session because you forgot he was behind you?! I’m a walking international crisis!”

Steve paused. “Wait. You trained with Thor?”

“Long story. I died once, came back, now I punch ghosts for fun and may or may not be legally considered a WMD by six governments.”

Steve took a long breath. “Do all teenagers do this now? Or is this just a… you thing?”

Danny groaned. “Just me. I’m special.”

Steve lowered his shield and sat cross-legged like they were about to have a heart-to-heart. “You okay, kid?”

“No! I haven’t slept in three days, my enemies keep possessing animatronics to scare me, and I just committed accidental patriotic assault!”

Steve tried not to smile. He really did. “You got a name?”

Danny sighed. “Danny. Danny Fenton. Or Phantom. Depends on how you know me.”

Steve looked intrigued. “You’re the ghost kid.”

Danny flinched. “I prefer ghost young adult, thank you.”

“You’re the one Nick Fury won’t shut up about.”

Danny’s eyes widened. “He talks about me?”

“Nonstop. Every meeting. ���The ghost kid leveled a tank with his pinky finger!’ ‘The ghost kid opened a portal to another dimension with a yawn!’” Steve did a passable impression of Fury’s gruff voice. “‘You think your team’s strong? Try containing a seventeen-year-old who talks to the dead like it’s a podcast!’”

Danny laughed, a bit unhinged, definitely sleep-deprived. “I did do the tank thing. That was an accident.”

“Fury thinks you’re the future.”

“That’s horrifying.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Danny looked at him warily. “Are you gonna try to recruit me?”

Steve considered. “Honestly? Not until you’ve slept. You look like you’d punch Thor if he asked you for coffee.”

“I have, and I did, and he was proud of me.”

“…Of course he was.”

There was a moment of silence, just the city humming beneath them, both of them sitting cross-legged like two war veterans who somehow found themselves on a rooftop in Manhattan instead of the battlefield they were clearly built for.

“So,” Steve said eventually. “You gonna tell me why you’re camped out here?”

Danny pointed to the tracker. “Someone in that building”—he gestured vaguely toward Stark Tower—“is leaking interdimensional ghost radiation like it’s designer cologne. I was trying to be subtle.”

Steve looked at the tower. “That’s Tony.”

Danny blinked. “Tony Stark is radiating ectoplasmic energy?”

“Yeah. He bought a ghost portal off eBay last month. Said it’d be good for ‘multiverse surveillance.’ It… got loose.”

Danny stood up so fast he swayed. “I knew it! I told Jazz that someone was messing with rogue ghost portals again and she said I was paranoid! I am paranoid! But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong!”

“You’re… very high-strung.”

Danny glared. “Do you have a collection of alternate-universe versions of yourself constantly trying to kill you?”

Steve held up his hands. “Fair.”

Suddenly, Danny wobbled. His legs buckled, and Steve caught him with a grunt. “Woah, hey, hey! Okay, that’s enough hero time for now.”

“I’m fine,” Danny slurred. “I’ve just been awake for three days. It’s not a problem unless I—”

He passed out.

Steve stared down at the kid—a half-dead, glowing teen who apparently punched like a demigod and talked like a sitcom character on speed—and muttered, “…Tony owes me so much alcohol for this.”

He slung Danny over his shoulder and started walking toward the Tower.

A few floors down, Tony Stark looked up from his holograms and blinked as the elevator pinged open.

Steve walked in carrying what looked like a sleep-dead raccoon in human form.

Tony blinked. “Did you adopt a raccoon?”

“He punched me.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “…You?”

“Knocked me back five feet.”

Tony whistled. “Damn. Strong raccoon.”

“He’s nineteen. Name’s Danny Fenton. Ghost kid.”

Tony’s eyes widened. “Oh. Oh. The one Fury thinks is a nuclear bomb with social anxiety.”

Steve dumped Danny on the nearest couch. “Let him sleep. He earned it.”

Tony looked down at Danny. “Should I be worried he’s glowing?”

“No. But maybe hide the ghost portal.”

Tony scoffed. “I knew someone was tracking it.”

Danny stirred, groaning, “Stark, I swear to the Ancients, if I wake up and your toaster is haunted again, I’m putting salt in your arc reactor…”

Steve stared. “Wait, what?”

Tony sighed. “Long story. Ghosts don’t like me. Something about my attitude.”

Steve sat down, already dreading explaining this to Fury.

Across the room, Danny turned on his side, mumbled, “Tell the Captain I didn’t mean to punch him…”

Steve looked over, surprisingly fond. “It’s fine, kid. I’ve had worse.”

Danny let out a soft snore.

Tony grinned. “You’re getting soft.”

“He reminds me of Bucky.”

Tony choked. “Excuse me?”

Steve shrugged. “If Bucky died and came back with ghost powers, he’d absolutely punch me in the face for fun.”

“…Okay, yeah, that tracks.”

And thus began the weird, wonderful, mildly catastrophic journey of Danny Fenton, ghost boy, menace to the Avengers, and accidental best friend to Captain America, who still rubbed his jaw now and then, remembering the punch that nearly knocked out a super-soldier’s tooth.

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - March 15-21

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! This month’s doodles, like every third month, will be free to the public, so take a look!

1. Zoo 'overjoyed' as lion cubs increase pride to 10

“The litter of rare northern African lions was the second batch to be born recently at Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire, after three arrived in November. […] "The youngsters will grow up side-by-side with their half-siblings, and I'm sure they'll love having an abundance of playmates."”

2. Ohio Appeals Court Rules Trans Care Is Healthcare, Strikes Down Ban For Trans Youth

“The ruling rested on two key findings: first, that gender-affirming care constitutes legitimate medical treatment, and second, that parents have the constitutional right to make healthcare decisions for their children.”

3. Oystercatcher Recovery Campaign Offers a Rare Success Story about Shorebird Conservation

“Fifteen years of coordinated conservation efforts have produced a significant recovery in the U.S. population of the American oystercatcher[….] Schulte predicted that the protection efforts will survive [federal funding cuts] because of the large number of non-federal partners involved.”

4. Fish-tracking robot aims to make fishing more sustainable in developing nations

“A solar-powered, transparent [robot] that can roam the waters autonomously for five days at a stretch, counting fish [… can help fishers] avoid the overfishing [… and] mean less fuel consumed by boats searching for schools of fish, and less degradation of nets due to trawling where there are no fish.”

5. Zoologist Rediscovers Grasshopper Species Believed Extinct

“[… T]he Appalachian grasshopper […] camouflages with its surroundings—perhaps part of the reason people haven’t seen it [since 1946]. [… A zoologist] had seen some reports on iNaturalist that he thought could have been the species[, …] and after surveying several locations, he found a female.”

6. Scaling agroforestry can support fisheries, local food production and cultural practices

“The research found that combining native forest protection (100,000 acres) with transitioning suitable fallow agricultural land to agroforestry (400,000 acres) could [reduce] erosion and boosting nearshore food production by almost 100,000 meals per year[….]”

7. A cell pulls off one of the 'Holy Grails' of biotechnology

“[… A] single-celled alga with a nucleus [… can conduct] a chemical conversion reaction that helps create some of the essential building blocks of life. […] One day, Capone says the nitroplast could be introduced to crops to allow them to convert their own nitrogen without relying on external fertilizer.”

8. FERC: Solar + wind set for a strong 3-year run despite Trump’s sabotage

“Solar accounted for 68.2% of all new generating capacity placed into service in January – more than double the solar capacity added a year earlier (1,176 MW). […] Around 30% of US solar capacity is in small-scale (e.g., rooftop) systems that are not reflected in FERC’s data.”

9. As ghost junk haunts the sea, ‘mermaids’ are fighting back

“Just two days after completing the training, Diana Garcia, one of the Sirenas, helped remove nearly 900 kilograms (2,000 pounds) of [abandoned] ghost gear and debris in the waters near her community[….]”

10. A Nest-Protecting Program Pays Off for Alabama’s Snowy Plovers

“Over the past two breeding seasons, 18 Snowy Plover chicks fledged—a major turnaround after five years of almost no chick survival. [… The team made] a concerted effort to educate the public about the need to give the birds space[, … and] people have not directly caused plover losses in Alabama recently[….]”

March 8-14 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist

Epic Systems makes the dominant electronic health record (EHR) system in America; if you're a doctor, chances are you are required to use it, and for every hour a doctor spends with a patient, they have to spend two hours doing clinically useless bureaucratic data-entry on an Epic EHR.

How could a product so manifestly unfit for purpose be the absolute market leader? Simple: as Robert Kuttner describes in an excellent feature in The American Prospect, Epic may be a clinical disaster, but it's a profit-generating miracle:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/

At the core of Epic's value proposition is "upcoding," a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the "nonprofit" hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits. Here's a particularly egregious form of upcoding: back in 2020, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft Collins, CO locked all its doors except the ER entrance. Every patient entering the hospital, including those receiving absolutely routine care, was therefore processed as an "emergency."

In April 2020, Caitlin Wells Salerno – a pregnant biologist – drove to Poudre Valley with normal labor pains. She walked herself up to obstetrics, declining the offer of a wheelchair, stopping only to snap a cheeky selfie. Nevertheless, the hospital recorded her normal, uncomplicated birth as a Level 5 emergency – comparable to a major heart-attack – and whacked her with a $2755 bill for emergency care:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

Upcoding has its origins in the Reagan revolution, when the market-worshipping cultists he'd put in charge of health care created the "Prospective Payment System," which paid a lump sum for care. The idea was to incentivize hospitals to provide efficient care, since they could keep the difference between whatever they spent getting you better and the set PPS amount that Medicare would reimburse them. Hospitals responded by inventing upcoding: a patient with controlled, long-term coronary disease who showed up with a broken leg would get coded for the coronary condition and the cast, and the hospital would pocket both lump sums:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The reason hospital administrators love Epic, and pay gigantic sums for systemwide software licenses, is directly connected to the two hours that doctors spent filling in Epic forms for every hour they spend treating patients. Epic collects all that extra information in order to identify potential sources of plausible upcodes, which allows hospitals to bill patients, insurers, and Medicare through the nose for routine care. Epic can automatically recode "diabetes with no complications" from a Hierarchical Condition Category code 19 (worth $894.40) as "diabetes with kidney failure," code 18 and 136, which gooses the reimbursement to $1273.60.

Epic snitches on doctors to their bosses, giving them a dashboard to track doctors' compliance with upcoding suggestions. One of Kuttner's doctor sources says her supervisor contacts her with questions like, "That appointment was a 2. Don’t you think it might be a 3?"

Robert Kuttner is the perfect journalist to unravel the Epic scam. As a journalist who wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine, he's got an insider's knowledge of the health industry, and plenty of sources among health professionals. As he tells it, Epic is a cultlike, insular company that employs 12.500 people in its hometown of Verona, WI.

The EHR industry's origins start with a GW Bush-era law called the HITECH Act, which was later folded into Obama's Recovery Act in 2009. Obama provided $27b to hospitals that installed EHR systems. These systems had to more than track patient outcomes – they also provided the data for pay-for-performance incentives. EHRs were already trying to do something very complicated – track health outcomes – but now they were also meant to underpin a cockamamie "incentives" program that was supposed to provide a carrot to the health industry so it would stop killing people and ripping off Medicare. EHRs devolved into obscenely complex spaghetti systems that doctors and nurses loathed on sight.

But there was one group that loved EHRs: hospital administrators and the private companies offering Medicare Advantage plans (which also benefited from upcoding patients in order to soak Uncle Sucker):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8649706/

The spread of EHRs neatly tracks with a spike in upcharging: "from 2014 through 2019, the number of hospital stays billed at the highest severity level increased almost 20 percent…the number of stays billed at each of the other severity levels decreased":

https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-02-18-00380.pdf

The purpose of a system is what it does. Epic's industry-dominating EHR is great at price-gouging, but it sucks as a clinical tool – it takes 18 keystrokes just to enter a prescription:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2729481

Doctors need to see patients, but their bosses demand that they satisfy Epic's endless red tape. Doctors now routinely stay late after work and show up hours early, just to do paperwork. It's not enough. According to another one of Kuttner's sources, doctors routinely copy-and-paste earlier entries into the current one, a practice that generates rampant errors. Some just make up random numbers to fulfill Epic's nonsensical requirements: the same source told Kuttner that when prompted to enter a pain score for his TB patients, he just enters "zero."

Don't worry, Epic has a solution: AI. They've rolled out an "ambient listening" tool that attempts to transcribe everything the doctor and patient say during an exam and then bash it into a visit report. Not only is this prone to the customary mistakes that make AI unsuited to high-stakes, error-sensitive applications, it also represents a profound misunderstanding of the purpose of clinical notes.

The very exercise of organizing your thoughts and reflections about an event – such as a medical exam – into a coherent report makes you apply rigor and perspective to events that otherwise arrive as a series of fleeting impressions and reactions. That's why blogging is such an effective practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

The answer to doctors not having time to reflect and organize good notes is to give them more time – not more AI. As another doctor told Kuttner: "Ambient listening is a solution to a self-created problem of requiring too much data entry by clinicians."

EHRs are one of those especially hellish public-private partnerships. Health care doctrine from Reagan to Obama insisted that the system just needed to be exposed to market forces and incentives. EHRs are designed to allow hospitals to win as many of these incentives as possible. Epic's clinical care modules do this by bombarding doctors with low-quality diagnostic suggestions with "little to do with a patient’s actual condition and risks," leading to "alert fatigue," so doctors miss the important alerts in the storm of nonsense elbow-jostling:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5058605/

Clinicians who actually want to improve the quality of care in their facilities end up recording data manually and keying it into spreadsheets, because they can't get Epic to give them the data they need. Meanwhile, an army of high-priced consultants stand ready to give clinicians advise on getting Epic to do what they need, but can't seem to deliver.

Ironically, one of the benefits that Epic touts is its interoperability: hospitals that buy Epic systems can interconnect those with other Epic systems, and there's a large ecosystem of aftermarket add-ons that work with Epic. But Epic is a product, not a protocol, so its much-touted interop exists entirely on its terms, and at its sufferance. If Epic chooses, a doctor using its products can send files to a doctor using a rival product. But Epic can also veto that activity – and its veto extends to deciding whether a hospital can export their patient records to a competing service and get off Epic altogether.

One major selling point for Epic is its capacity to export "anonymized" data for medical research. Very large patient data-sets like Epic's are reasonably believed to contain many potential medical insights, so medical researchers are very excited at the prospect of interrogating that data.

But Epic's approach – anonymizing files containing the most sensitive information imaginable, about millions of people, and then releasing them to third parties – is a nightmare. "De-identified" data-sets are notoriously vulnerable to "re-identification" and the threat of re-identification only increases every time there's another release or breach, which can used to reveal the identities of people in anonymized records. For example, if you have a database of all the prescribing at a given hospital – a numeric identifier representing the patient, and the time and date when they saw a doctor and got a scrip. At any time in the future, a big location-data breach – say, from Uber or a transit system – can show you which people went back and forth to the hospital at the times that line up with those doctor's appointments, unmasking the person who got abortion meds, cancer meds, psychiatric meds or other sensitive prescriptions.

The fact that anonymized data can – will! – be re-identified doesn't mean we have to give up on the prospect of gleaning insight from medical records. In the UK, the eminent doctor Ben Goldacre and colleagues built an incredible effective, privacy-preserving "trusted research environment" (TRE) to operate on millions of NHS records across a decentralized system of hospitals and trusts without ever moving the data off their own servers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

The TRE is an open source, transparent server that accepts complex research questions in the form of database queries. These queries are posted to a public server for peer-review and revision, and when they're ready, the TRE sends them to each of the databases where the records are held. Those databases transmit responses to the TRE, which then publishes them. This has been unimaginably successful: the prototype of the TRE launched during the lockdown generated sixty papers in Nature in a matter of months.

Monopolies are inefficient, and Epic's outmoded and dangerous approach to research, along with the roadblocks it puts in the way of clinical excellence, epitomizes the problems with monopoly. America's health care industry is a dumpster fire from top to bottom – from Medicare Advantage to hospital cartels – and allowing Epic to dominate the EHR market has somehow, incredibly, made that system even worse.

Naturally, Kuttner finishes out his article with some antitrust analysis, sketching out how the Sherman Act could be brought to bear on Epic. Something has to be done. Epic's software is one of the many reasons that MDs are leaving the medical profession in droves.

Epic epitomizes the long-standing class war between doctors who want to take care of their patients and hospital executives who want to make a buck off of those patients.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en