Bloomberg: “Your Old Radiator is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon”

The Spanish Influenza, which caused just over 20,000 deaths in New York City alone, changed heating once and for all. That’s according to Dan Holohan, a retired writer, consultant, and researcher with extensive knowledge of heating systems and steam heating. (Among his many tomes on the topic: The Lost Art of Steam Heating, from 1992.) Most radiator systems appeared in major American cities like New York City in the first third of the 20th century. This golden age of steam heat didn’t merely coincide with that pandemic: Beliefs about how to fight airborne illness influenced the design of heating systems, and created a persistent pain point for those who’ve cohabitated with a cranky old radiator.

Health officials thought (correctly) that fresh air would ward off airborne diseases; then as now, cities rushed to move activities outdoors, from schools to courtrooms. When winter came, the need for fresh air didn’t abate. According to Holohan’s research, the Board of Health in New York City ordered that windows should remain open to provide ventilation, even in cold weather. In response, engineers began devising heating systems with this extreme use case in mind. Steam heating and radiators were designed to heat buildings on the coldest day of the year with all the windows open. Anybody who’s thrown their windows open in January, when their apartment is stifling, is, in an odd way, replicating what engineers hoped would happen a century ago.

Patrick Sisson

Fascinating piece of history! I would have never guessed that radiators – very common in Romania as well to this day – were invented as a pandemic countermeasure. It makes you wonder which innovations will have a similar impact on society a century from now, while their original purpose is long forgotten.

CNBC: “AT&T dismantles Time Warner to battle Netflix: The inside story”

Although Stankey was new to media, he suffered the same disease as every other media executive: Netflix envy.

He thought Plepler was aiming too low. Plepler’s plan to generate $7.5 billion in annual revenue was 12% more than HBO’s eventual 2019 revenue. But it was a far cry from the $20 billion Netflix generated.

Stankey told Plepler he wanted a direct-to-consumer solution that could get to at least 60 million subscribers in five years, according to people familiar with the matter. HBO subscriptions had fallen from about 37.5 million in 2017 to 34.5 million in 2019. Over the same time, Netflix global subscriptions jumped 50%, from 111 million to 167 million.

If Stankey could convince investors that HBO Max would mirror Netflix’s growth trajectory, he might be able to capture a higher trading multiple for AT&T. This is the holy grail for media companies this decade — convincing Wall Street that streaming growth will make up for the decline of legacy businesses like cable TV and movie theater viewing. It’s also a strategy supported by AT&T’s most notable investor, activist hedge fund Elliott Management, which last year bet $3.2 billion that divesting non-core assets and focusing on streaming could lead to a surge in AT&T shares.

Alex Sherman

As expected following Disney’s decision, another major film studio is beginning to prioritize streaming as key to their long-term strategy. Last month, Warner Bros. announced that Wonder Woman 1984 will be released simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max, for no extra cost; later the company extended this policy to all their upcoming 2021 movie releases.

Microsoft Tech Community: “Introducing Microsoft Editor – Bring out your best writer wherever you write”

Editor in the browser extension

With the release of Microsoft Editor’s standalone browser extension, Editor now moves with you across the web so you can easily write clear, accurate content anywhere you want. Whether you are posting casually on Facebook or LinkedIn or writing in depth for a site like Medium, you can create with confidence knowing Editor will flag misspelled words and grammatical errors. As with the other places Editor is available, your Microsoft 365 subscription will give you access to advanced recommendations on style, clarity, inclusive language, and much more in 20+ languages. The Microsoft Editor browser extension will release in both the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge web stores in the next few weeks. When available, install and get started!

Lauren Nicholson & Megan Dohnal

I’ve missed this part about the browser extension in the initial launch of Microsoft Editor, but fortunately I found out about it later on Twitter, via JenMsft. I installed it in Edge some time ago and I have to say I find it very useful. I have always relied on Microsoft’s spell checker for corrections while writing long articles, both in English and in other languages, and it is good to have the same recommendations now available on the web – the suggestions built-in to browsers are not always the best. Misspelling is a common complaint on Twitter, and one of the main reasons people keep asking for an ‘edit’ button – I will probably sound pretentious, but if people are so concerned with this, they should take a moment and reread what they are about to tweet.

The Wall Street Journal: “Google, Facebook Agreed to Team Up against Possible Antitrust Action, draft lawsuit says”

The redacted lawsuit filed last week makes no mention of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. According to the draft version, Ms. Sandberg signed the deal with Google. The draft version also cites an email where she told CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives: “This is a big deal strategically.”

---

The final version of the lawsuit didn’t make public details about the deal’s value. The draft states that starting in the deal’s fourth year, Facebook is locked into spending a minimum of $500 million annually in Google-run ad auctions. “Facebook is to win a fixed percent of those auctions”, the draft version says. The lawsuit says “Facebook is to [REDACTED].”

According to the draft version, an internal Facebook document described the deal as “relatively cheap” when compared with direct competition, while a Google presentation said if the company couldn’t “avoid competing with” Facebook, it would collaborate to “build a moat”. The redacted lawsuit filed last week doesn’t include those quotes.

Ryan Tracy & John D. McKinnon

A classic case of collusion – and a big vulnerability for Google in this lawsuit, because agreements to fix prices can be easier to prove than the states’ other accusations, as the article notes further down the line. At the end of a difficult year, US regulators finally taking action against the market concentration in Big Tech can surely be counted as one of the positive developments of 2020.

rainylune: “Why your Instagram Engagement Kinda Sucks Right Now”

For privacy reasons, I’ll refer to the person I spoke to as Mr. Ig. I got a ton of really useful information out of this call, and I will probably have to write multiple articles to cover it all. The most important thing I learned was that Instagram’s algorithm will either reward or punish you based on your usage of the app as a whole. There are over 500 different factors, but it takes much more into account than just the likes, views, comments, etc of a specific post. The algorithm ranks your specific post by taking into account your use of Instagram as a whole.

Think of it like the algorithm is grading you in a class. One test alone doesn’t determine your whole grade - there’s still participation points, homework, classwork, projects, and more. You’ve gotta participate throughout the class as a whole, not just show up for one test and get an A on it.

---

Instagram currently has a team that is dedicated entirely to just finding good reels for them to promote. If your reel is chosen to be featured, they’ll choose to show it to more people for around a month, leading to a ton of views. But keep in mind that the promo team is Specifically looking at the back end for reels that were made using Instagram’s in app editor. which means no recycling tik toks. You can still have recycled videos do really well, but this basically disqualifies you from being chosen by the team.

Rachel Reichenbach

Interesting piece of information about Instagram’s current ranking algorithm. Since the source is an anonymous media expert from the Instagram Partnerships team, I would not take every statement at face value, but they sound plausible at the very least. The ‘ideal’ amount of content (3 feed posts, 8-10 stories, 4-7 reels and 1-3 IGTV weekly) makes an Instagram Creator feel like a full-time job – without proper pay on top of that – rather than a fun thing to do in your spare time, and is highly unrealistic for most people.

STAT: “Beware the danger of ‘vaccine euphoria’”

We get so kind of blinded by vaccine euphoria — the light at the end of the tunnel — that we underestimate how long that tunnel is, and how dangerous that tunnel is, said Peter Sands, executive director of the Swiss-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has expanded its mission to combat Covid.

For most of the countries the fund invests in, Sands added at a recent health summit hosted by the Milken Institute, vaccines are not going to be available at scale until late ‘21 at the earliest, and a lot of lives are going to be lost in that time in between.

So hand-washing, mask-wearing, social distancing — and, experts warn, a healthy new dose of cognitive dissonance — will continue to be the daily reality for most of us for months to come.

Todd S. Purdum

An important point that I don’t think gets enough attention from the public. There are many factors contributing to this, many scenarios how societies may fail to control the pandemic despite vaccines becoming available. The one presented in this article questions how long people will continue to follow basic prevention measures if they assume vaccinations will instantly ‘solve’ the pandemic. This is especially problematic as the currently approved vaccines require two doses four weeks apart, and the optimum virus protection only sets in around two weeks after the second dose. Even so, vaccinated people should continue to weak masks, as it is uncertain for now if vaccinations stop transmission, or just protect people from becoming sick.

National Geographic: “One in six Americans could go hungry in 2020 as pandemic persists”

By the end of this year, more than 50 million people could experience food insecurity, according to Feeding America, the country’s largest hunger-relief organization. That’s one in six Americans and one in four children—nearly a 50 percent increase from 2019. A Northwestern University study in June found that food needs had doubled nationally, and tripled for households with children. The pandemic has laid bare how many people are one paycheck or medical bill away from hunger.

In October, Feeding America’s network of food banks and pantries distributed some 548 million meals, up 52 percent from an average month before the pandemic. In November, with the holidays approaching, it may be more. When the fairgrounds gates opened in Dallas, volunteers waved cars through rows of orange cones to receive a 15-pound box of produce, dry goods, a frozen turkey, and a loaf of bread. In a typical year, the North Texas Food Bank holiday distribution serves around 500 people. This year, when the gates closed, they’d sent 8,500 people home with more than half a million pounds of food. Before the pandemic, the food bank’s clientele were largely employed people who needed extra help to make ends meet. Now, many of them told Cunningham they’d lost their jobs. And a third of those being served, she estimates, had never needed assistance before.

People are seeing hunger like they’ve never seen it before, she says.

Nina Strochlic

The recurring images of millions of Americans lining up at food banks are, to me at least, oddly reminiscent of the long queues in front of stores I experienced as a child during Romania’s Communist regime. Another symptom of how broken American society is for the poor, and how it has forgotten the lessons of its own history, specifically of The Great Depression.