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conference to spell out what role, if any, he would play in the future of
his business empire, but he`s since postponed talking to the press about
it, at least until January. There`s new pressure today from a group of
Senate Democrats, who unveiled a bill that would require Mr. Trump to
divest from his businesses, and put his assets in a blind trust.
Evacuations begin in war-ravaged Aleppo as a cease-fire allows Syrians to
escape from the battle`s bloody end. After grave mistakes in prediction
polls, the betting markets feel the loss. During the last three months of
the presidential campaign, fake or false news headlines actually generated
more engagement on Facebook than true ones, and today, Facebook launched
several new tools to flag and dispute what it calls the "worst of the
worst" when it comes to clear lies. With recreational marijuana now legal
in eight states, a serious health and safety question about the potency of
the psychoactive drug in cannabis, known as THC, are emerging.>
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REPORTER: Most analysts are saying Hillary Clinton is going to win in a landslide.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The odds are overwhelming of a Hillary Clinton victory on Tuesday.
SOLMAN: Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium became famous for his forecasting acumen in the 2012 election. Now, prophets like Wang are eating crow, or worse.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dr. Wang, you tweeted recently that you were so sure of the result, you`d eat a bug if Donald Trump pulled this thing out.
SAM WANG, PRINCETON ELECTION CONSORTIUM: See this? Here it goes.
SOLMAN: On the prediction markets, they actually bet money on the outcome. One of the largest, Paddy Power, an Irish bookie, paid out a million dollars to people who bet on Clinton 20 days before the election. That was just after, Skyped Paddy Power`s owner, whose real name is "Paddy Power," the Access Hollywood tape surfaced.
PADDY PWER, ONLINE BOOKMAKER: The one where he was grabbing certain parts of women`s anatomy, or boasting about that. And, and then we just thought that has to be it. We took an absolute conkers on it to be fair. We were left with our pants around our ankles at the end of it.
SOLMAN: An absolute conkers, pants around the ankles. On the other hand: a jackpot of PR.
In the U.S., we have two betting markets, only legal because they provide results for academic research and limit bets to modest amounts. As late as election night, at the office party of one of them, Predictit in Washington, D.C., the consensus among traders: Clinton at 80 percent.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everything`s invested in Clinton winning tonight.
SOLMAN: Among America`s academic prognosticators, however, there were dissenters.
RAY FAIR, YALE UNIVERSITY: This is the website that I put all the results on.
SOLMAN: Economist Ray Fair first forecast the Democrats would lose in November of 2014!
FAIR: The prediction I made two years ago was that the Republicans had a huge head start and were favored by quite a bit.
SOLMAN: His model is based on past history, period.
FAIR: So, there`s no polls, there`s no surveys, this is all just fundamental economic events that you`re talking about.
SOLMAN: Fundamental events, and to an economist, there`s nothing more fundamental than the rate of economic growth.
FAIR: A good economy helps the incumbent party, a bad economy doesn`t. What the opposition party should do if the economy is poor is to keep hammering the economy.
SOLMAN: Fair`s model considers just a few factors: if an incumbent is up for re- election, voters tend to give the president a second term. After eight years, voters tend to be itching for a change. But most important: the state of the economy in the four years before an election.
FAIR: In the 15 quarters of the second Obama administration, only two quarters had strong growth, growth bigger than 4 percent at an annual rate. That`s very low historically and the growth rate of this year, which counts a lot for the equation, was only 1.7 percent at an annual rate in the first three quarters of this year.
SOLMAN: By the end, Fair`s model predicted that the Democrat would get only 44 percent of the two-party vote. Since Clinton beat Trump by 2 percent, and wound up with 51 percent of the two-party total, he thinks Clinton actually did much better than she should have, given the economy, and his model did much worse.
FAIR: Had the Republicans nominated some mainstream person, they probably, most people would think, they probably would have done much better than they did.
SOLMAN: But Fair did get the winner right, unlike so many of the pros.
Why did the prediction markets do so badly?
FAIR: I think they overestimated the polls and underestimated the fundamentals about the economy.
SOLMAN: So pretty humbling for those of us who follow the prediction markets, no?
JUSTIN WOLFERS, ECONOMIST: It was a humbling for a lot of us in a lot of different ways, yes.
SOLMAN: Economist Justin Wolfers studies the prediction markets, and swears by them. Neither the polls nor the markets were really so far off, he told me by Skype from Michigan.
WOLFERS: Remember the Chicago Cubs were two games behind in the World Series and betting markets said that there was only a 30 percent to win the World Series.
As history now records it, they went on and won the World Series. Well, betting markets pretty much said the same thing about Donald Trump.
So, we were surprised, but we should have been no more surprised than we were when the Cubs won the World Series.
SOLMAN: "The New York Times" Upshot was another prediction site on which many relied. It expressed Clinton`s odds of losing in terms of an NFL kicker missing an easy field goal.
When I first began to think that Donald Trump had a real chance was when "The New York Times" Upshot made that field goal analogy, and my favorite kicker missed field goals from a shorter distance than the odds were of Donald Trump winning.
WOLFERS: One of the things that we learn here, and this is a lesson for both the media and for social scientists, is how difficult it is to communicate clearly about probabilities.
SOLMAN: David Rothschild tends the website PredictWise, which tracks the prediction markets and makes forecasts of its own, as on election night.
DAVID ROTHSCHILD, PREDICTWISE FOUNDER: Right now, we have the presidency at about 89 percent for Hillary Clinton.
SOLMAN: So, every day, I went to your site and I was certain that Donald Trump was going to lose and I told everybody who asked me, you misled me.
ROTHSCHILD: Look, the website PredictWise had a bunch of different data up there, and it was important to take the best available historical data- based approach and that really is the prediction market data and that`s what we led with the top line numbers for, because that is what we know has worked historically.
SOLMAN: But Rothschild also had a model based on the economic fundamentals.
ROTHSCHILD: It showed the Republican candidate getting 282 electoral votes for a narrow Electoral College victory. I`m not going to sit here and tell you I was right because I like everyone else who looked at the idiosyncratic information coming out from the election and said look, "This is a year in which the fundamentals were going to be off."
FAIR: And that`s why I didn`t want to talk to people like you.
SOLMAN: One last time, Professor Fair:
FAIR: Because it was kind of embarrassing to come in and say Trump looks like he`s going to win and this and that when I -- that`s what the equation said.
SOLMAN: Were you surprised by the outcome?
FAIR: Yes.
SOLMAN: So you didn`t have the courage of your own conviction.
FAIR: I didn`t have the courage of the equation`s prediction, OK?
SOLMAN: And so, even professor fair didn`t heed the simple punch line of his model, of this story, and perhaps of this election.
FAIR: "It`s the economy, stupid," would be the very simple answer to that.
SOLMAN: Oh by the way, the prediction markets like Paddy Power are now giving odds on Donald Trump`s re-election.
PADDY POWER, PADDY POWER OWNER: Four to one odds to be returned next time so that means he`s got like a 20 percent chance of retaining the presidency next time around. When Obama was elected for the first time, it would have been more like a 50 percent chance of him getting reelected. So, we`re still underestimating the man.
SOLMAN: Unless, I suppose, the economy tanks in the interim.
In New York, for the "PBS NewsHour", this is economics correspondent Paul Solman, who lost $200 to the producer of this story, it went to charity, and a bottle of very good sherry I still owe someone by following the prediction markets.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR ANCHOR: It was a stunning finding, even in a digital age where stories of all kind go viral. During the last three months of the presidential campaign, fake or false news headlines actually generated more engagement on Facebook than true ones. Facebook and other social media platforms were criticized for not doing enough to flag or dispute these posts.
Today, Facebook launched several new tools to flag and dispute what it calls the "worst of the worst" when it comes to clear lies. Those tools are essentially embedded in your individual feed.
Here`s a bit of a video the company posted about how it will work.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FACEBOOK VIDEO NARRATOR: You may see an alert before you share some links that have been disputed by third-party fact checkers. You can then cancel or continue with the post. If you suspect a news story is fake, you can report it. It just takes a few taps. Your report helps us track and prevent fake news from spreading.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SREENIVASAN: Let`s learn more about this effort to detect and slow the spread of fake news, part of our occasional series on the subject. Will Oremus has been writing about this extensively for "Slate" and working on that site`s own new tool for identifying false stories.
First, Will, let`s talk a little bit about what Facebook announce today. How is it going to work?
WILL OREMUS, SLATE: So, Facebook`s approach to fake news has several components. One thing it`s going to try to do is make it easier for users to report it when they see fake news in their feeds. The next thing they`re going to do is they`re going to take that information about stories that are being reported as fake, and they`re going to use some software, run some algorithms and create a dashboard of stories that might be fake and give access to that dashboard to third-party checking organizations. So, these are like Snopes or PolitiFact, Factcheck.org.
Those fact checkers are going to have their human editors evaluate some of the most viral of the stories that have been flagged as fake, and if they determine it is in fact a fake news story, Facebook is going to treat it differently. It`s going to show it to fewer people in its feeds. It`s going to make it go less viral and it`s also going to give people a warning before they try to share that story, saying this story has been disputed. It will still let you share it. It`s not censoring or filtering out anything. But it is downgrading it in the ranking algorithm and it is letting people know that this has been disputed.
SREENIVASAN: So, Facebook is not the arbiter of the truth. There are third parties checking this for them, right?
OREMUS: Yes, and Facebook has been incredibly reluctant to become the arbiter of what`s true for good reason. Facebook, the value of its business, depends on appealing to people on both sides, all across the political spectrum.
So, it doesn`t want to be a media company. It has said this many times. What it is doing here is shrewd, I think. It is delegating the responsibility to respected, non-profit, third-party organizations whose whole job is to figure out what`s true and what`s not.
SREENIVASAN: You have been covering this space for a while. You want to draw a distinction between what`s fake news and what are just outright lies and conspiracies. There is a distinction.
OREMUS: Yes, the term "fake news" is relatively news. A few years ago if somebody said, "fake news," you wouldn`t know necessarily what they are talking about, maybe they were talking about a satire site like "The Onion "or "The Daily Show." It came in to currency in recent months because of the rise of a particular type of thing, which is a story that`s basically made up. It was very popular during the election season for people to-- for hoaxsters to make up stories that played to people`s political biases.
So, something like, you know, Hillary Clinton is about to be arrested by the New York Police Department for email crimes.
SREENIVASAN: Yes.
OREMUS: They would just make that up. They would publish it. And it would get shared widely on Facebook. Since then, the term has become applied -- it has become a political football. And people call -- you hear people on the right calling the "New York Times" fake news, people on the left saying Breitbart is fake news. But originally, it was actual hoaxes that were made up out of whole cloth.
SREENIVASAN: Now, people have been trying to fix the fake news problem. There was a recent hack-a-thon, and some Princeton students came up with what they thought was a fix. Your folks at "Slate" had actually worked on a tool. You guys just launched this, not coincidentally on Monday.
Let`s take a look at how this works. We`re going to put this up on the screen here. So, if I come across a fake news story in my feed, and there`s this big red banner saying, "This news story is fake. Here`s how we know. Share the proof."
How do you know? Identify by this as fake. This is the tool.
OREMUS: Yes, that`s right. So, what we wanted to do was not just flag stories as fake when they appear in your Facebook feed. We actually wanted to give users the power to do something about it, because -- I mean, it`s so frustrating, right? You try to be a good consumer of the media, you try to evaluate what`s true and what`s credible, but then you see friends and relatives sharing this stuff.
So, what we do is we actually provide a link to a reputable debunking of that particular story that will appear automatically. And then we prompt you to share that link with the person who posted the fake news so that they and all of their followers can see that that story is fake or they can go to the debunking site and judge of the evidence for themselves.
SREENIVASAN: Now, there`s a tool you can actually add to your browser. It`s kind of an extension, a Chrome extension and a button that works there. We can look at other examples of stories as well.
Who is the arbiter of truth in your system? Who decided that this story was false, even though it looks just like an ABC news site?
OREMUS: Yes, I mean, that`s a good question, and this is really the trickiest question on this whole thing. This is going to be an issue for Facebook, too. I mean, if one of these fact check organizations says this story has some parts that are true, some parts that are false. Is that a fake news story?
I think what we`ve done and in fact it seems what Facebook has done as well is to try to set a really high bar for what counts as fake. It`s not just a story that might be misleading.
SREENIVASAN: Yes.
OREMUS: Or has a couple of factual errors in it. It`s a story intentionally designed to mislead people and it`s just -- you know, it`s a hoax, basically. So we have human editors who are going to be reviewing the posts that are flagged by our users as potentially fake and they`re going to be looking for, again, a reputable third-party site that has used evidence to debunk that. We`re not going to be, you know, doing the debunking ourselves.
SREENIVASAN: Can technology solve this problem? There is a recent Pew study saying 14 percent of people out there shared a fake news story, even after they knew it was fake.
OREMUS: Yes. No, technology can`t solve the whole problem. I think technology can be a part of the solution. And that`s because it`s not just a technological problem or just a human problem.
And there are human issues at work here in why fake news is shared. There`s confirmation bias. There`s the desire for something to be true. I mean, you want something to be true.
SREENIVASAN: Yes.
OREMUS: What`s your incentive to go and check it out. But there is also a technological component, which is that Facebook in particular has had this leveling effect on the media where a story from abcnews.com, which is a big, reputable news site, looks just the same in your Facebook feed as a story from abcnews.com.co, which is a hoax site designed to trick people.
And so, Facebook has created the conditions for this fake news to thrive. And that`s why I think, you know, technology, whether it`s Facebook or a tool like ours, technology can be part of the solution. But it has to be human, too.
SREENIVASAN: That and a wonderfully informed citizenry and who are media literate.
Will Oremus from "Slate" -- thanks so much.
OREMUS: Thanks for having me.
(BREAK)
JUDY WOODRUFF, PBS NEWSHOUR ANCHOR: With recreational marijuana now legal in eight states, a serious health and safety question about the potency of the psychoactive drug in cannabis, known as THC, are emerging. In Colorado, some marijuana products contain 90 percent pure THC, with little research documenting the physical and mental effects on consumers.
This week, the state`s health department announced more than $2 million in grants to study the impacts on driving and cognitive functioning.
As John Ferrugia of Rocky Mountain PBS in Denver reports, there are concerns that the effects on some users could be deadly.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MARC BULLARD: 2016 is a year of something new.
JOHN FERRUGIA, ROCKY MOUNTAIN PBS: In December 2015, Marc Bullard felt on top of the world. He had landed a good job in Denver after graduating magna cum laude from Southern Methodist University.
MARC BULLARD: It`s been a good year.
FERRUGIA: He made video diaries to keep his family and friends updated on his life, looking forward to the New Year.
MARC BULLARD: It`s time to start planning projects.
FERRUGIA: But just four months later, in April 2016, Marc Bullard took his own life. His written diary shows severe depression seems to have taken a quick hold on him.
MIKE BULLARD, MARC BULLARD`S FATHER: You know, December, he`s fine, he comes home for the Christmas holiday.
FERRUGIA: And Mike and Ginny Bullard (ph) say he spent time with family and friends and showed no sign of being down.
MIKE BULLARD: And what we saw in the in the diary later was by January the 16th, I guess, he`s talking about suicide.
FERRUGIA: It was only after his death that his parents began reading his written diaries.
When did you first see the first entry about dabbing?
MIKE BULLARD: That was in the March the 5th. And that`s where he talks about you know, I think I`ve been dabbing too much.
FERRUGIA: Dabbing, Mike and Ginny had never heard of it. For the uninitiated, dabbing is a way to smoke a potent form of highly concentrated THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. It`s known as wax, shatter, and honey. It gives the rush of an instant high. And in Colorado, where recreational marijuana is legal, there are no limits on THC concentration levels in a dab.
Dabbing was becoming part of the subculture looking for an ever increasing THC high.
GINNY BULLARD, MARC BULLARD`S MOTHER: Yes, we heard that marijuana was legal but we`re thinking about people smoking cigarettes. This is a very potent marijuana concentrate. And some people have told us that the THC levels are 80 to 90 percent. We had no idea that this was something that was legal in Colorado.
FERRUGIA: Not only is high potency THC legal in Colorado, there has been an ever increasing effort to extract THC in its purest form.
RALPH MORGAN, CEO, ORGANA LABS: The sophistication in labs like this is so high, that we can achieve near perfect purity, 98 percent, 99 percent THC or CBD or any cannabinoid that we`re isolating and extracting to the crystalline form.
FERRUGIA: Ralph Morgan is the CEO of Organa Labs, a company that extracts THC from marijuana for use in a smoking device. His solution used by consumers is almost 90 percent pure THC.
MORGAN: The industry is chasing purity for the benefits of that. Those benefits are a product that`s repeatable, that`s safe, and has an effect that`s consistent. With purity comes potency.
FERRUGIA: While Morgan and others in the industry provide an ever purer product, and high potency, it is not their job to worry about how much consumers use, or how they use it, nor is it their responsibility under Colorado law. Even so, the industry knows that adverse reactions are bad for business.
MORGAN: Cannabis is very safe but it`s not foolproof. And no one is going to -- no one is going to defend not exercising moderation. And anything in life can fog your judgment or can be detrimental if it`s not done in moderation.
FERRUGIA: Ginny and Mike point to Marc Bullard`s own words in his diary indicating that he was suffering from a dabbing addiction.
GINNY BULLARD: "I found out I was dabbing too much which I already knew and had cut back in February, but apparently if you overdo it, you can get almost like poison and experience some negative effects."
FERRUGIA: People have said well you know you can`t get addicted to marijuana.
KARI FRANSON, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO SCHOOL OF PHARMACY: Oh, you can. Oh, definitely, you can.
FERRUGIA: Dr. Kari Franson is associate dean at the University of Colorado School of Pharmacy and has been studying cannabis for years, including human studies in the Netherlands where marijuana consumption was allowed long before Colorado.
FRANSON: It`s because marijuana stimulates dopamine in this part of our brain that we call the reward center.
FERRUGIA: In the case of 23- year-old Marc Bullard, his death certificate lists a contributing factor to "use of concentrated marijuana products". And the autopsy report showed high levels of active THC in his body.
But even Marc`s parents realize there is no way to know if it was THC that caused his slide into despair.
FRANSON: Low doses of THC, we know what happens. These super high concentrations of THC, we don`t know what happens because we have not been studying it. And when they smoke that, they`re getting in the 600 to 800 milligrams of THC.
FERRUGIA: That`s compared to a limit of 10 milligrams in each serving of an edible in Colorado, or maybe 25 milligrams of THC in a typical marijuana cigarette.
But it`s not just mental health that is of concern.
Brandon Cullip was 17, had only had his driving permit for a week, and his friends in the car told him he was too high to drive, but that didn`t stop him. Cullip pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide, and reckless driving in the death of 16-year old Chad Britton. Cullip is serving a two-year sentence in youth corrections. Police say he had been dabbing high concentrate THC before getting behind the wheel.
Chad Britton is one of 36 people who died in 2014 in automobile accidents that the Colorado Department of Transportation attributed to fatalities where THC was the only substance inhibiting the driver. 2014 is the year marijuana was legalized for recreational use. That is compared to 107 people who died that year in alcohol- only crashes. The percentage of marijuana-only fatalities is small but has been edging up since 2013.
FRANSON: Dabbing has become very popular, very quickly, without any kind of understanding how much is actually getting into the brain and what are the effects of a typical user.
DR. LARRY WOLK, COLORADO DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT: The credible research that exists was all done on THC potency. That`s very low compared to what we see being made available through products today.
FERRUGIA: Dr. Larry Wolk is director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. His agency is tasked with ensuring marijuana products are safe for consumption.
Wolk says the many delivery systems of high-potency cannabis products complicate its study.
WOLKS: You can smoke it, you can eat it, you can dab it, you can do whatever. And we don`t know what all of those different forms do with regard to absorption and the effect it has on people`s health.
MIKE BULLARD: We didn`t know about the concentrated marijuana products and the different levels of the THC. Everybody thinks it`s innocent, you know, just kind of relax people, it`s going to make him mellow, it`s not going to do any danger to him.
GINNY BULLARD: After reading through these and seeing the significant changes in his patterns, this is the only thing that we feel that it points to, is the dabbing.
FERRUGIA: But voters here, and in other states, have approved recreational marijuana, despite any potential harmful effects. In southern Colorado, a center of production and sale of cannabis, voters rejected a measure that would have shut down operations. The message: legal marijuana is here to stay in Colorado and across the country. The only question now is whether states might tighten regulation for the ever increasing number of consumers.
For the PBS "NewsHour", I`m John Ferrugia in Denver.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SREENIVASAN: Now to another in our "Brief but Spectacular" series, where we hear from interesting people about their passions. Tonight, entrepreneur Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen, a non-profit venture capital fund, talks about using the tools of business to address global poverty.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ, FOUNDER AND CEO OF ACUMEN: When I was six years old, my first grade nun, Sister Mary Theophane, beat it into my head to whom much is given much is expected. And so, I always wanted to change the world.
I moved to Rwanda to help start the first micro finance bank and soon thereafter realized that most people don`t want saving. Most people want choice and opportunity, which is another way of saying dignity.
In a funny way, I became an accidental banker and ended up in Latin America during the financial debt crisis of the early 1980s. And there I saw that I love the tools of business. The problem was that low-income people who were so industrious had no access to the banks and that`s why I went into international development and saw that on the other side, there was a great humanitarian ethos, but it lacked the efficiency, the effectiveness of the markets.
We often say the market is the best listening device that we have. So, if I give you a gift, you`re unlikely to tell me what you don`t like about it. But if I try to tell you a solar light, you`re going to tell me exactly what you think.
We created an organization with this idea that you could change the way the world tackles poverty by using something we call "patient capital." We took philanthropy and rather than give it away, we would invest it in intrepid entrepreneurs that were going where both markets and government aid had failed the poor, basic services like health care, education, agriculture, energy, workforce development.
What entrepreneurs and others we`ve invested in have in common is what we call moral imagination. Moral imagination starts with putting yourself in another person`s shoes and seeing the world through their perspective. But it`s more than empathy. It`s the ability to envision a world and build institutions in which all people matter.
So, often, we look at poverty in terms of how much a person makes, rather than understand their contribution as a human being.
When we see companies enable people to have access to clean drinking water or agricultural inputs that enable them to make a little more income, one of the first things they do is turn around and help somebody else. It`s seeing that there is no one above you or below you. And really that`s the world that we need on see right now when we are so divided, and yet have so much opportunity to become united.