This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The Scramble to Defuse the ‘Feral Swine Bomb’ — Diane Peters in Undark: “I’ve heard it referred to as a feral swine bomb,” says Dale Nolte, manager of the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program at the United States Department of Agriculture. “They multiply so rapidly. To go from a thousand to two thousand, it’s not a big deal. But if you’ve got a million, it doesn’t take long to get to 4 [million], then 8 million.” Most wild pigs are a mixture of domestic breeds and European wild boar. “The problem with the hybrids is you get all of the massive benefits of all of that genetics. It creates what we’d call super pigs,” says Brook. Domestic pigs have been bred to be fertile year-round and have big litters — now averaging more than 10 in each — and also to grow large. (Farmers limit their diets in captivity, but they fatten up when they graze at will in the wild.) Boars, meanwhile, have heavy fur and other attributes that help them brave the winter months. Wild or domestic, the species is highly intelligent with a keen sense of smell. Over the last few decades, wild pigs in some regions have grown to unmanageable numbers: Texas has about 1.5 million and spends upwards of $4 million annually controlling them, with little hope of eradicating the population. Florida, Georgia, and California also have vast populations.
• The Internet is for End Users — Internet Architecture Board, at the Internet Engineering Task Force: For whom do we go through the pain of gathering rough consensus and writing running code? After all, there are a variety of parties that standards can benefit, such as (but not limited to) end users, network operators, schools, equipment vendors, specification authors, specification implementers, content owners, governments, nongovernmental organizations, social movements, employers, and parents. Successful specifications will provide some benefit to all the relevant parties because standards do not represent a zero-sum game. However, there are sometimes situations where there is a conflict between the needs of two (or more) parties. In these situations, when one of those parties is an "end user" of the Internet -- for example, a person using a web browser, mail client, or another agent that connects to the Internet -- the Internet Architecture Board argues that the IETF should favor their interests over those of other parties.
• Ad Tech Could Be the Next Internet Bubble — Gilad Edelman in Wired: The real trouble with digital advertising, argues former Google employee Tim Hwang—and the more immediate danger to our way of life—is that it doesn’t work. Hwang’s new book, Subprime Attention Crisis, lays out the case that the new ad business is built on a fiction. Microtargeting is far less accurate, and far less persuasive, than it’s made out to be, he says, and yet it remains the foundation of the modern internet: the source of wealth for some of the world’s biggest, most important companies, and the mechanism by which almost every “free” website or app makes money. If that shaky foundation ever were to crumble, there’s no telling how much of the wider economy would go down with it.
• Dying in a Leadership Vacuum — the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine: The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states. Governors have varied in their responses, not so much by party as by competence. But whatever their competence, governors do not have the tools that Washington controls. Instead of using those tools, the federal government has undermined them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was the world’s leading disease response organization, has been eviscerated and has suffered dramatic testing and policy failures. The National Institutes of Health have played a key role in vaccine development but have been excluded from much crucial government decision making. And the Food and Drug Administration has been shamefully politicized, appearing to respond to pressure from the administration rather than scientific evidence. Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government, causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed “opinion leaders” and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.
• Back to Normal — Ted Rall:
  
• Be Still — George Monbiot: Fundamentally, this is not a vehicle problem but an urban design problem. Or rather, it is an urban design problem created by our favoured vehicle. Cars have made everything bigger and further away. Paris, under its mayor Anne Hidalgo, is seeking to reverse this trend, by creating a “15-minute city”, in which districts that have been treated by transport planners as mere portals to somewhere else become self-sufficient communities, each with their own shops, parks, schools and workplaces, within a 15 minute walk of everyone’s home. This, I believe, is the radical shift that all towns and cities need. It would transform our sense of belonging, our community life, our health and our prospects of local employment, while greatly reducing pollution, noise and danger. Transport has always been about much more than transport. The way we travel helps determine the way we live. And at the moment, locked in our metal boxes, we do not live well.