Vox

‘Tis the season for sitting in front of the cozy glow of a Christmas movie. Don’t you just love the snow, the twinkling tree lights, and, of course, the charming sounds of festive music? But not all Yuletide melodies are created equal. In a 2015 analysis, FiveThirtyEight found that nine out of the top 10 most featured Christmas songs on movie soundtracks were in the public domain. Or in other words, Christmas movies are full of the classic songs we know and love — that also happen to be free from copyright and free from expensive licensing fees. The reason why public domain Christmas songs are so popular may be obvious: Lower-budget films, like the ones our moms have grown to love from the Hallmark channel, can’t always afford to pay for newer, popular songs. But public domain Christmas songs also hold a unique charm. Their repeated presence over the years has woven them into the very fabric of the holiday season, creating a sense of shared joy and nostalgia. And composers like Russ Howard III, who we interviewed for this video, know this. He explains that musicians will often use public domain Christmas songs as a starting point for creating original compositions. Taking cues from classics like "Deck the Halls," they craft new pieces that fit seamlessly into the emotional beats of a scene, while still having a festive flair. Correction: At 5:54, we mistakenly suggested that Deck the Halls was used in a scene from Hallmark's My Christmas Guide. In fact, the song used was Up on the Housetop. For more info, check out these links: - Why are Christmas movies all about Kissing? A theory: https://www.vox.com/2023/12/19/240032... - FiveThirtyEight Christmas song analysis: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/... - Hallmark Christmas movies use more than just the public domain to keep costs down: https://www.businessinsider.com/hallm... - If you’d like to learn more about the public domain: https://copyright.universityofcalifor... - If you’d like to learn more about music clearance: https://blog.audiosocket.com/blog/dem... Subscribe to our channel! http://goo.gl/0bsAjO Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com.

One inescapable aspect of modern life is that humans are constantly creating data. So as enterprise data booms, IBM Storage Flashsystem is empowering businesses by scaling them efficiently, by rethinking the way storage operates entirely.

The “blue wall” once referred to a group of Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast states that, conventional wisdom said, “always vote for Democrats.” Unfortunately for Democrats, that was wrong, and in 2016 Donald Trump shockingly won three “blue wall” states — including, narrowly, the state of Michigan. It maybe shouldn’t have been such a shock, though. All three of the “blue” states Trump won actually had a history of electing Republicans at the state level. Michigan in particular had been fully taken over since 2010 by Republicans, who then spent years gutting unions, restricting abortion, loosening environmental protections, and generally just turning a Republican policy wish list into law. So Trump winning Michigan was, in a way, just the culmination of a years-long drift to the right there. But by 2022, something had changed dramatically. In a midterm election where Republicans were favored, Democrats won every branch of elected government in Michigan — governor, state House, and state Senate. The state Senate in particular had not been under Democratic control since 1984. And Democrats got busy using their new power immediately: repealing much of the right-wing legislation of the previous years, passing strong LGBTQ protections, quadrupling a tax credit for the poor, and allocating a billion dollars for the auto industry to transition to electric cars. Suddenly Michigan was cranking out more progressive legislation than almost any other state in the US. So to recap: Michigan was once a blue state, except it wasn’t actually, and in fact over time it got pretty red, but then it became an actual blue state. (Again?) Or something like that. Obviously, the truth is that Michigan is a swing state. But the story of each of those swings is actually key to understanding how US politics work in the 2010s and 2020s. And it can tell us a lot about our next election, too. Chapters: 0:00 The blue wall 2:42 Maps 4:52 The bellwether 9:51 Exit polls 13:08 2022 15:43 Michigan and the US Correction: the timeline incorrectly shows Republicans winning control of the state House in 2006. Democrats won the House that year. Sources: For Michigan election data we drew from two useful websites from the Michigan Department of State. First, they have election results down to the county level going back to the late 90s: https://www.michigan.gov/sos/election... They also have a tool that produces election results down to the city/township level: https://miboecfr.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/... To show national and statewide exit polls over time, we used NBC News’s data — they’re among the only organizations whose granular exit poll results both nationally and statewide going back a decade are still publicly available.

Deep in the geographic center of Uruguay, there’s a peculiar group of trees just a few kilometers down the road from the small town of San Gregorio de Polanco. From the ground, it's not particularly notable. But from above, the view is mind-boggling: Hundreds of trees are arranged in perfect concentric arcs, all spiraling toward the center. Together, they look remarkably like a human fingerprint. When we first saw this forest in a Reddit post, we were fascinated. Why had the trees been arranged in this shape? Who planted them there? And why — when you zoom out on satellite view — was the entire country of Uruguay covered in similar-looking forests? To answer that question, we went straight to the source: interviewing locals, experts, and people whose lives have been shaped by a transformed landscape and economy. Further reading: Read the text of the original “forestry law”: https://www.impo.com.uy/bases/leyes/1... Read some of Alexandra’s work on afforestation and wildlife: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... Eilís O’Neill has a great feature in the Nation on Uruguay’s forestry industry: https://www.thenation.com/article/arc... More stories about residents affected by the railway construction: https://yle.fi/a/3-11756418 Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com.

Sahil Adeem also explores the concepts of modernism and post-modernism, shedding light on their relevance in today's society. Furthermore, he delves into the significance of self-esteem, particularly for Muslims, and offers practical advice on how to enhance it. The session extends to encompass strategies for raising IQ levels and addressing crucial issues facing Muslims, including the Palestine conflict. Sahil provides insightful solutions to acquire financial, moral, political, and mental capital for empowerment. Additionally, gain valuable insights into YouTube monetization and Sahil's perspective on the boycott movement. Don't miss out on this enlightening discussion that promises to broaden your horizons and inspire action. Tune in now!

When I look at movies from the ’20s to the ’90s, I’m blown away by the worlds that filmmakers were able to create with their visuals. From Mary Poppins to Ben-Hur to Star Wars, they truly made things that people had never seen before — all with little to no help from computers. How did they pull off such striking and novel visuals? Well, often, it was just with a paintbrush and some glass. With a technique called matte painting, skilled artists would paint a scene and black out a portion of the frame for live-action photography. The actors would be filmed on footage that blacked out the painted backdrop, and then filmmakers would combine the two exposures to make one seamless scene. This, of course, all changed once computers entered the industry. By the late 1990s, matte paintings were almost entirely digital. Just a few decades later and now they’re almost all made in 3D. With the development of AI, a new evolution might be on the horizon. Tune in to Vox’s latest to find out how AI might soon change the matte painting industry — again.

When you think of disinfecting a space, what comes to mind? Wipes? Gels? Sprays? Maybe air purifiers or effective HVAC systems? All of these are great defenses against viruses and bacteria, but one thing has been missing from the toolkit despite our knowing about it for over a century: light. Ultraviolet light is an incredibly powerful disinfectant. Study after study has proven that it can obliterate viruses and bacteria, and yet it’s not often thought about as a defense against germs. In fact, when most people think of UV, they think of the harmful rays from the sun that cause cancer — not the PR you want when advertising, obviously. Luckily, a few years after the pandemic lockdowns, researchers have found a type of UV that isn’t strong enough to penetrate human skin but still effectively stops the germs. Could it be our next defense? Check out the video above to learn more. Don’t forget to read the full article on our website by Dylan Matthews: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/239... Studies on far-UV’s effectiveness against various viruses can be found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159... https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159... https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159... For more on ozone production (including Barber’s study): https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021... (MIT’s write-up on her study: https://news.mit.edu/2023/germicidal-...) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021... The ill-fated mouse study (even though they didn’t get cancer this time, we’re still sad about it!): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/f... The original study from 1937 can be found here: https://ghdcenter.hms.harvard.edu/fil... For more on 1Day Sooner and Far UV Technologies: https://www.1daysooner.org/about/ https://faruv.com/

We're living through an inflection point for artificial intelligence: From generated images and video to advanced personal assistants, a new frontier of technologies promises to fundamentally change how we live, work, and play. And yet for all the buzz and concerns about how AI will change the world, in many ways, it already has. From spam filters and sentence suggestions in our email inboxes to voice assistants and fitness tracking built into our phones, countless machine learning tools have quietly weaved their way into our everyday lives. But when we're surveyed about which everyday technologies use artificial intelligence and which don't, we aren't particularly good at knowing the difference. Does that matter? Read the Pew Research Center's full report on public awareness of artificial intelligence: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2... Read more of Karen Hao's reporting here: https://karendhao.com/clips Check out this piece from the team at AI Myths about the difficulty with clearly defining AI: https://www.aimyths.org/the-term-ai-h... Correction: At 3:22, we mistakenly suggested that the difference between machine learning and deep learning is that in deep learning, data hasn’t been structured and labeled by humans. Deep learning can use unstructured and unlabeled data, but the main differentiating factor is that deep learning uses many layers of neural networks, a branch of machine learning inspired by the human brain. More on deep learning here: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-t...

We’ve learned how to predict weather over the past century by understanding the science that governs Earth’s atmosphere and harnessing enough computing power to generate global forecasts. But in just the past three years, AI models from companies like Google, Huawei, and Nvidia that use historical weather data have been releasing forecasts rivaling those created through traditional forecasting methods. This video explains the promise and challenges of these new models built on artificial intelligence rather than numerical forecasting, particularly as it relates to the ability to foresee extreme weather. Here are the papers that describe the models mentioned in the video. Google’s GraphCast: https://www.science.org/stoken/author... Huawei’s Pangu-Weather: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158... Nvidia’s FourCastNet: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.11214 Here is the announcement of the ERA5 dataset, released by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in 2020: https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com... We interviewed Dr. Aaron Hill over email for this video. Hill is involved in developing responsible AI for environmental science via AI2ES: https://www.ai2es.org Google has also developed a weather forecasting model called Nowcasting, which is already embedded in its weather products specifically for short-term precipitation forecasts: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog...

Humans are filling the space around Earth with trash. Most of this junk comes from abandoned satellites, discarded jet engines, and other mission-related debris. And when these objects unintentionally collide, they explode into thousands of debris fragments that can seriously damage operational spacecraft. With a booming commercial space industry that has put an unprecedented number of new satellites in space in just the past few years, our space debris problem is only getting worse. Scientists worry about a situation called the “Kessler syndrome,” coined in the 1970s, where a runaway chain reaction of collisions and fragmentation results in a cloud of debris around Earth so dense that it threatens future space missions. But there are a few options to begin clearing out the debris surrounding us, most of them united in a strategy of slowing the objects down enough to de-orbit them — forcing them to reenter Earth’s atmosphere to be destroyed. For the largest category of debris, fragments measuring more than 10 centimeters in size, one solution would be to send a small spacecraft into orbit, where it would rendezvous with the large piece of debris and slow its orbit either by pushing or pulling it. For the smallest class of debris, which spans a range of 1 millimeter to 1 centimeter in size, there are two main ideas. One would be to put a physical sweeper into orbit to catch or slow these tiny, untrackable fragments. The other would be to introduce a cloud of metal dust into orbit to weigh them down and drag them into Earth’s atmosphere. For the class of space debris in the middle, measuring between 1 and 10 centimeters, the idea of using ground- and space-based lasers as a cleanup method has circulated for years. In this approach, a laser would use radar to track a piece of debris as it flies into view and then blast a pulse of energy at it. The goal is to nudge the debris enough to disrupt its orbit, ideally enough to slow it down. Right now, NASA considers this the most cost-effective way to deal with most space debris, but it will take commitment from the international space community to implement any space debris removal strategies.

America’s two-party system is widely hated. Very few Americans think the two major parties do an adequate job representing us, and most say more parties are needed. But when it comes time to vote, very few of us actually vote for third-party candidates. Often, this is explained as either a failure of will (we’d have third parties if more people would just vote for them), or a conspiracy (the political and media establishments suppress third-party candidates and ideas). And it’s not that those things aren’t true. But there’s a much simpler explanation, and it’s the very basic rule governing almost every single one of our elections: Only one person can win. If you’re American, that probably sounds utterly reasonable: what the hell other kinds of elections even are there? But the answer is: lots. Winner-take-all elections (also called plurality voting, or “first past the post”) are actually a practice that most advanced democracies left behind long ago — and they’re what keep us from having more political options. Even if you’re not sold on the need for more parties in the US, though, scratch the surface of “only one person can win” a little and you start to see how it actually produces perverse results within the two-party system as well. It’s a big part of why the political parties have moved farther apart from each other, and it leaves about half of the country without any political representation at all. Watch the video above to see how.

There’s no denying that Americans rely heavily on Social Security benefits. Estimates from the Social Security Administration found that 97% of adults over the age of 60 are either collecting or will start collecting Social Security. As of February 2023, about one in every five residents in the US collected benefits from these funds. For such a widely used program, it’s a bit surprising that people in the US know so little about how it works. To be fair, most of the news around this program over the past decade has been about how it’s doomed in one way or another. Millennials and younger may see the money being taxed from their paychecks and believe they’ll probably never see it again, but is the program really destined to fail? And what do we stand to lose if it does? Check out the video above to get the most basic facts about Social Security in the United States and what to expect in the coming years. Help keep Vox free for everybody: http://www.vox.com/give-now From doing your taxes for free to filing your first return, Vox has you covered: https://www.vox.com/even-better-guide... Sources and further reading: You can find more interesting history of Social Security and an FAQ sheet here: https://www.ssa.gov/history https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhist... For more on who collects (and who doesn’t): https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/popul... For more on how Social Security helps lift Americans out of poverty: https://blog.ssa.gov/poverty-data-sho... https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-... For more on how Social Security is funded including data on the trust funds: https://www.nasi.org/learn/social-sec... https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsh... https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4...

It’s a common refrain: school is full of useless (if interesting!) lessons… but we learn next to nothing about how to manage our finances. It’s true that many Americans still lack basic financial knowledge, which is a contributing factor to the money challenges – high levels of debt, insufficient savings, and poor investment decisions – that a lot of us face. But it’s not necessarily true that we never learned anything: many of us sat through a few classes on money management. It just may not have been enough to stick. In this video, we’ll take a brief look at the state of financial education in the US: past, present, and future. Help keep Vox free for everybody: http://www.vox.com/give-now From doing your taxes for free to filing your first return, Vox has you covered: https://www.vox.com/even-better-guide... Sources and further reading: See the Council for Economic Education's full report, here: https://www.councilforeconed.org/ You can find Carly’s research, here: https://www.carlyurban.com/home/finan... And to learn more about how your state stacks up, check out the American Public Education Foundation’s roundup, here: https://www.thenationsreportcard.org/ Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com.

There’s a reason so many of us don’t have enough retirement savings. By the standards of most financial experts, Americans are woefully behind on saving for retirement. The reason why is rooted in changes in policy to our retirement system with today's result being a flawed design in how people set aside money so they can one day stop working. In this video, we interviewed four people about their level of retirement preparedness and two experts about the state of retirement readiness more broadly in the US. One culprit lies in changes to the country’s pension system, which sets the US apart from countries like Australia and the UK; these places have systems which help more people save more money for retirement. Sources and further reading: Vanguard’s “How America Saves” report was recommended by one of our experts, John Scott, and provided some of the data in the video: https://institutional.vanguard.com/co... https://crr.bc.edu/the-national-retir... John Scott’s work at the Pew Charitable Trusts includes how lack of retirement readiness impacts state and federal budgets: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research... Teresa Ghilarducci has written extensively about retirement, including her book Work, Retire, Repeat: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/... Sen. Bernie Sanders has released a report about how the state of US retirement impacts low-income seniors: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-... We used the TransAmerica Retirement survey for some of our data: https://transamericacenter.org/retire...

Yemen's Houthis say they're avenging Gaza. But there's a lot more to it. After the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7, 2023, the Houthis, a Yemeni rebel group, began attacking ships passing through the Red Sea. The Houthis pledged to attack any ship in these waters that does business with Israel, to protest Israel’s war on Gaza and to show solidarity with Palestinians there. But as the attacks have continued, another motive for them has become apparent: strengthening the Houthis’ control of Yemen. After a nine-year civil war, the Houthis today control a sizable area in Yemen, with over 70 percent of the Yemeni population within the group’s territory. The conflict has devastated the country, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. More than 377,000 Yemenis have been killed — by airstrikes from a Saudi-led coalition; landmines and detonations planted by the Houthis; a lack of medical services; and scarcity of food and water due to a naval blockade. And both the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis have been accused of committing war crimes against Yemenis. Today, the Houthis are attempting to establish themselves as Yemen's legitimate leaders in the eyes of Yemenis, though they’ve done little to improve the country’s humanitarian crisis. The Red Sea attacks, which appear to have significant support among the Yemeni people, might be a means to achieve that goal.

The (bad) options for Americans facing an emergency expense. Follow to our channel and turn on notifications ) so you don't miss any videos A 2023 Federal Reserve survey found that a third of Americans say that they don't have the cash to cover a $500 emergency expense. So what happens if they need it? In this video, we compare six of the ways Americans say they get money when they don't have it: credit cards, bank loans, borrowing from a friend or family member, payday loans, selling something, and going into overdraft. How difficult is each one to access? How does paying off each kind of debt work? And how much does each one cost down the line? None of these options are great for someone who can't pay an emergency expense. But some of them are a lot worse than others. This video is presented by DCU. DCU doesn't have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this possible. Sources and further reading: The Federal Reserve report: https:// www.federalreserve.gov/public...

Why we’re all paying so much more for Netflix, and what we can do about it. Subscribe to our channel Further reading: - https://www.theverge.com/23901586/str... - https://variety.com/2023/digital/news... - https://www.antenna.live/post/underst... - https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/1/5/2... - https://www.businessinsider.com/netfl... - https://www.bloomberg.com/screentime When streaming first came onto the scene, it seemingly came with a promise: the movies and TV that you love, without ads, for a much cheaper price than cable. Less than 20 years down the line, it feels like that promise has been broken. Streaming is more expensive than ever, and prices just keep going up. Password sharing has been cracked down on, forcing more of us to pay to stream. And in the backdrop of all that, advertising is back with a vengeance, thanks to the rise of the cheaper ad-supported subscription tiers. As a consumer, this feels infuriating. But we’re not entirely at the whim of these companies. So why is all this happening? And what can we do to not go broke while still enjoying our favorite shows? Note: The title on this video has been changed. Previous title: Streaming got expensive. Now what? Vox's Even Better is here to offer deeply sourced, actionable advice for helping you live a better life