New York Post-inspired fashion set to hit the runway

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Jeremy Scott is going to show off these New York Post-inspired threads on Friday. Marcus Mam

What a sensational look!

Designer Jeremy Scott — a couture hero to club kids for his kitschy themes and bold colors — will get tongues wagging Friday with a Fashion Week runway show featuring dresses inspired by the New York Post.

Scott gave us a sneak peek at his Fall 2019 collection, which includes black-and-white shirts, tops and dresses studded with Swarovski crystals and emblazoned with the logo of this very newspaper.

“I was really thinking about our obsession with headlines and gossip and salaciousness,” he told The Post Wednesday night over the phone in between model fittings.

Scott’s inspiration draws heavily from his friend Aleksandra Mir’s 2007 collection, called Newsroom 1986–2000, in which the Polish artist drew copies of the New York Post and other newspaper covers.

On what inspired these drawings, Mir has written that “[Other papers and the] New York Post serve as practical tools that unite the population around shared joys and fears; they help spread the city’s gossip and form its identity.”

Scott’s headlining frocks are a majorly meta moment doused in the designer’s signature glamour. (Hello sparkles!)

“Some people are solely getting information from Instagram. It’s a little bit mind-boggling. And it’s also disconcerting. And that’s part of my open conversation. People aren’t seeing the bigger picture sometimes, and also when you chop things up — even as I have on the dresses — they’re no longer exactly what they were,” said Scott.

As for where to wear them?

“A red carpet, a party or just for kicking about.” he said.

Traumatized Facebook moderators turn to sex on the job

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Worst. Job. Ever.

So-called “content moderators” on Facebook — tasked with vetting user posts that have been flagged for pornographic material, graphic violence or hate speech — are so traumatized by their work that they’ve resorted to smoking weed, spouting conspiracy theories and even having sex on the job, according to reports.

In one instance cited by a Monday article in the Verge, a job-training session in Phoenix included a trainee named “Chloe” playing a video for a group of fellow trainees that “depicts a man being murdered.”

“Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life,” according to the tech blog. “Chloe’s job is to tell the room whether this post should be removed.”

The woman ended up having a panic attack and — like many of the 15,000 other contract workers used by Facebook to moderate graphic and disturbing content — experienced trauma symptoms for months, according to the 7,500-word exposé.

Even for moderators who are skilled at what they do, the job takes a toll. Workers at the site featured in the report were found having sex in the office lactation room, as well as bathroom stalls, stairwells and the parking garage — a phenomenon one former moderator called “trauma bonding.”

“You get really close to your coworkers really quickly,” she said. “If you’re not allowed to talk to your friends or family about your job, that’s going to create some distance.”

Facebook, which has been harshly criticized for being slow to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform — including during the 2016 presidential election — has tapped contractors such as Phoenix-based Cognizant and Accenture in Austin, Texas, to get it done.

These content moderators earn $28,800 a year — a fraction of the $240,000 average annual haul of a median Facebook employee — and are expected to perform their jobs with 95 percent accuracy.

“It’s a strain. I don’t know what I’m going to see,” one contractor at Accenture told Bloomberg. “I don’t have a problem with nudity — that’s what I signed up for — but then there are random beheadings.”

Employees who are fired for not properly auditing routinely threaten their former coworkers, according to the report, prompting one supervisor to begin bringing a gun to work with him in the event that an interaction becomes violent.

It’s not just videos of graphic violence that have to be vetted by the army of moderators; employees also must review photos and videos of child pornography and bestiality, as well as an endless stream of conspiracy theories.

One auditor, the Verge reports, now believes that the Earth is flat, while another has become convinced that 9/11 was a government conspiracy. A third moderator “has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust,” according to the report.

In a blog post responding to the Verge story, Facebook VP of Global Operations Justin Osofsky wrote that the social network takes the well-being of its moderators seriously, outlining the steps Facebook is taking to hold its partners accountable.

“We are committed to working with our partners to demand a high level of support for their employees; that’s our responsibility and we take it seriously,” Osofsky said.

Facebook shares finished the day up 1.7 percent, at $164.62.

DOJ asks judge to give final approval on CVS-Aetna merger

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President Trump’s Department of Justice asked a judge to give final approval of the $69 billion merger between CVS and Aetna on Monday — but there’s only a 50 percent chance of the judge agreeing, insiders said.

Drugstore company CVS Health did close its planned merger with insurance giant Aetna in November after getting the DOJ’s seal of approval and agreeing to sell some of Aetna’s businesses as a merger condition. But DC District Judge Richard Leon, who needs to clear the deal, has not allowed the companies to fully integrate and said he is not going to be a rubber stamp — leading DOJ insiders to give their latest request a 50 percent shot of success, sources told The Post.

There’s concern the deal will lead to higher drug prices.

NASA is spending $42 million to understand space weather

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Getting the daily weather forecast for your area is something that countless people do every single morning, but Earth’s weather systems aren’t the only kind of weather that could have a dramatic impact on your life. Space weather — that is, the ebbs and flows of particles around Earth, much of which comes from our sun — will likely play a big role in humanity’s future, and understanding it could be vital to our survival as a species.

To that end, NASA has approved funding for a project called the Atmospheric Waves Experiment, or AWE for short. The $42 million mission will launch in summer 2022 and will study specific features in Earth’s atmosphere to better understand the impact of space weather on our planet.

In a new blog post, NASA explains that the AWE mission will involve attaching instruments to the exterior of the International Space Station. Once installed, it will be able to closely study a phenomenon called airglow, which NASA describes as “colorful bands of light in Earth’s atmosphere.”

AWE is just one of several missions in NASA’s Heliophysics Explorers Program to be selected for funding. These smaller-scale missions are meant to compliment larger research efforts undertaken by NASA scientists.

“The Explorers Program seeks innovative ideas for small and cost-constrained missions that can help unravel the mysteries of the universe and explore our place in it,” NASA’s Paul Hertz said in a statement. “This mission absolutely meets that standard with a creative and cost-effective mission to solve mysteries about Earth’s upper atmosphere.”

Understanding space weather is important for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it can dramatically impact the effectiveness of satellite technology like GPS, which is used every day by a huge percentage of the population.

A 30 million-page archive of humanity’s achievements is headed to the moon

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Tucked away inside Israel’s Beresheet lunar lander, currently on its way to the moon, is a massive archive documenting humanity’s achievements.

The collection of images, text and symbols is the first part of a project to build a “Lunar Library” and part of a bigger push to create a space-based archive of Earth.

According to the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF), the library contains 30 million pages of human history that covers a wide range of subjects, languages and time periods, all stored on a DVD-sized archive made of 25 nickel discs that are each only 40 microns thick.

An 84-page document that AMF provided to Gizmodo showed subject categories in the time capsule including aerospace, mathematics, women’s studies, humor and criminology.

The first four layers contain over 60,000 analog images of pages of books, photos, illustrations and documents, AMF explained. Among the included items will be a copy of The World Factbook.

When Gizmodo asked why the full list of contents was not being released, the AMF told the news outlet:

“We’re only announcing some of the content in the library right now because of the various partnerships we have. Much more content will be revealed … Rather than rely on problematic curations of material, we want to include the full breadth and diversity of recorded human knowledge and culture and a record of the life and civilization of planet Earth.”

There will be more discs sent to the moon in the coming years, including in partnership with Astrobotic next year.

The Beresheet lander was launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and could reach the moon by April 11. The lander and its time capsule will remain on the moon indefinitely.

The moon looms large for a number of countries’ space programs. China, for example, recently became the first country to successfully land a probe on the far side of the moon when the Chang’e 4 lander reached the lunar surface on Jan. 2.

Apps used to help smartphone-addicted teens battle depression

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Psychiatrists and parents have long been worried about the psychological and emotional risks of high rates of social media use among teens, with so much time spent on their phones limiting face-to-face interaction, the development of social skills, and potentially contributing to depression and anxiety. But now, researchers are trying to find ways to use the fact that teens are on their phones so much to track possible signs of depression and intervene.

“The goal of our work aims to turn smartphones into ‘fitness trackers’ for the human brain,” Dr. Alex Leow, an app developer and associate professor in psychiatry, bioengineering and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, tells Rolling Stone. The app she’s working on, BiAffect, uses iPhone metadata, such as “proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, barometer, Touch ID and pressure-sensitive display,” to track users’ mood and mental health, and is one of several similar projects in development.

Several recent studies show a correlation between social media and smartphone use and depression, anxiety, and loneliness: One showed that the more people used Facebook in a given time period, the more likely they were to be unhappy. Another recent study showed that in addition to total time spent on one social media site, people who used multiple networking sites or apps were more likely to be depressed. And yet another showed that among young adults, those who used social media for more than two hours per day were more likely to deal with feelings of social isolation than those who used it less.

And teens and young adults are, notoriously, the heaviest social media and smartphone users — 88 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 reported that they use social media, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, and 92 percent of teens and young adults owned a smartphone as of 2015. The same demographic has seen a spike in depression and anxiety in recent years. A 2017 study of over half a million 8 to 12th graders found that depressive symptoms among that group increased by 33 percent between the years of 2010 and 2015, and matched that increase to the spread of smartphone adoption, year by year. Suicide rates in teens have skyrocketed in the last several years, increasing by over 70 percent between 2006 and 2016, and several experts point to social media as a contributing factor.

Experts in adolescent mental health generally advise parents to limit their kids’ social media use, monitor their online activity, and model good habits by limiting their own screen time. But as smartphones become more and more ubiquitous, these tactics can feel increasingly futile and insufficient. So, some researchers decided, if teens are going to be on their phones all day anyway, maybe that’s the place to intervene and spot signs of depression before they escalate to dangerous levels.

“BiAffect analyzes data streams generated by a user’s interaction with their smartphone to create insights about their mood and cognition,” Dr. Leow says. “From these data, patterns associated with particular moods or cognitive states are identified which can be used to inform the care of people with mental health disorders and promote improved outcomes.”

BiAffect and other apps like it are currently in the research stage, and experts estimate we’re likely still a few years away from mood-sensing apps being widely available and effective. In addition to perfecting the science, there are also ethical questions involved in tracking such intimate information, and the general public is already wary of data-collecting apps since they often exist to sell personal data to corporations for profit.

“Critically ensur[ing] data security and participant privacy is the biggest challenge thus far,” Dr. Leow says.

Cell companies are still selling your real-time location data

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A new bombshell report from Joseph Cox over at Motherboard details how carriers like Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile are all in the business of selling real-time location data of subscribers. While this in and of itself isn’t a new development, Motherboard reveals that this location data far too often ends up in the hands of bounty hunters who are willing to give up an individual’s location for the right price.

Cox himself used himself as a guinea pig of sorts and paid a bounty hunter $300 to help him track down the location of a friend who agreed to be part of the experiment. The bounty hunter, armed with only the phone number of the target, was able to track down the target’s location to a hyper-specific area and sent a snapshot of the location via Google Maps.

“The bounty hunter did this all without deploying a hacking tool or having any previous knowledge of the phone’s whereabouts,” the report reads. “Instead, the tracking tool relies on real-time location data sold to bounty hunters that ultimately originated from the telcos themselves, including T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint, a Motherboard investigation has found.”

Again, it’s never been a secret that carriers provide location tracking to authorized third-parties in specific scenarios. For example, a carrier might allow a bank access to a user’s real-time location as a means to better detect fraud. The problem, naturally, is that this data inevitably ends up in the wrong hands. And speaking to the number of players with access to said data, Cox reveals that upwards of six third-parties had access to the target’s location.

In the case of the phone we tracked, six different entities had potential access to the phone’s data. T-Mobile shares location data with an aggregator called Zumigo, which shares information with Microbilt. Microbilt shared that data with a customer using its mobile phone tracking product. The bounty hunter then shared this information with a bail industry source, who shared it with Motherboard.

And though Cox paid $300 for his experiment, sometimes a phone can be tracked for as little as $5.

It’s also interesting that this experiment was done with a T-Mobile device given that John Legere this past June pledged that his company “will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen.”

NASA: Icy object past Pluto looks like reddish snowman

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LAUREL, Md. — A NASA spacecraft 4 billion miles from Earth yielded its first close-up pictures Wednesday of the most distant celestial object ever explored, depicting what looks like a reddish snowman.

Ultima Thule, as the small, icy object has been dubbed, was found to consist of two fused-together spheres, one of them three times bigger than the other, extending about 21 miles in length.

NASA’s New Horizons, the spacecraft that sent back pictures of Pluto three and a half years ago, swept past the ancient, mysterious object early on New Year’s Day. It is 1 billion miles beyond Pluto.

On Tuesday, based on early, fuzzy images taken the day before, scientists said Ultima Thule resembled a bowling pin. But when better, closer pictures arrived, a new consensus emerged Wednesday.

“The bowling pin is gone. It’s a snowman!” lead scientist Alan Stern informed the world from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, home to Mission Control in Laurel, Maryland. The bowling pin image is “so 2018,” joked Stern, who is with the Southwest Research Institute.

The celestial body was nicknamed Ultima Thule — meaning “beyond the known world” — before scientists could say for sure whether it was one object or two. With the arrival of the photos, they are now calling the bigger sphere Ultima and the smaller one Thule.

Thule is estimated to be 9 miles (14 kilometers) across, while Ultima is thought to be 12 miles.

Scientist Jeff Moore of NASA’s Ames Research Center said the two spheres formed when icy, pebble-size pieces coalesced in space billions of years ago. Then the spheres spiraled closer to each other until they gently touched — as slowly as parking a car here on Earth at just a mile or two per hour — and stuck together.

Despite the slender connection point, the two lobes are “soundly bound” together, according to Moore.

Scientists have ascertained that the object takes about 15 hours to make a full rotation. If it were spinning fast — say, one rotation every three or four hours — the two spheres would rip apart.

Stern noted that the team has received less than 1 percent of all the data stored aboard New Horizons. It will take nearly two years to get it all.

The two-lobed object is what is known as a “contact binary.” It is the first contact binary NASA has ever explored. Having formed 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system taking shape, it is also the most primitive object seen up close like this.

About the size of a city, Ultima Thule has a mottled appearance and is the color of dull brick, probably because of the effects of radiation bombarding the icy surface, with brighter and darker regions.

Both spheres are similar in color, while the barely perceptible neck connecting the two lobes is noticeably less red, probably because of particles falling down the steep slopes into that area.

So far, no moons or rings have been detected, and there were no obvious impact craters in the latest photos, though there were a few apparent “divots” and suggestions of hills and ridges, scientists said. Better images should yield definitive answers in the days and weeks ahead.

Clues about the surface composition of Ultima Thule should start rolling in by Thursday. Scientists believe the icy exterior is probably a mix of water, methane and nitrogen, among other things.

The snowman picture was taken a half-hour before the spacecraft’s closest approach early Tuesday, from a distance of about 18,000 miles.

Scientists consider Ultima Thule an exquisite time machine that should provide clues to the origins of our solar system.

It’s neither a comet nor an asteroid, according to Stern, but rather “a primordial planetesimal.” Unlike comets and other objects that have been altered by the sun over time, Ultima Thule is in its pure, original state: It’s been in the deep-freeze Kuiper Belt on the fringes of our solar system from the beginning.

“This thing was born somewhere between 99 percent and 99.9 percent of the way back to T-zero (liftoff) in our solar system, really amazing,” Stern said. He added: “We’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s not fish or fowl. It’s something that’s completely different.”

Still, he said, when all the data comes in, “there are going to be mysteries of Ultima Thule that we can’t figure out.”