Neat project. An example of the kinds of social scientific research that's possible these days.
...Now a team of humanists and computer scientists has combined early-20th-century primary sources and 21st-century big-data analysis to better understand how America responded to the viral threat in 1918...
The team began with several questions: How did reporting on the Spanish flu spread in 1918? And how big a role did one influential person play in shaping how the outbreak was handled?
The piece uses Chicago to explore the broader neoliberal campaign against public schools, focusing on how education “reformers” manufactured a budget crisis through a combination of creative accounting, secretive tax schemes (specifically TIF), and media cooperation. It also looks at some of the organizing that developed to regain local control of schools (and possibly just forced Rahm into a run-off election!).
What is stunning is the degree of out and out grifting that has taken place in Chicago, with millions diverted from public schools to create a false image of a budgetary crisis. And some of the money wound up in dubious-looking pockets, like a Hyatt Hotels franchise.
This kind of project highlights the ways we may eventually reintegrate humanity with nature.
The Wyoming town of Jackson gets long and bitter winters. One mile above sea level in a landlocked state, months of heavy snow leave the town unable to grow much of its own produce, forcing it to import fresh fruit and vegetables from other states or other countries. But the creators of a new initiative called Vertical Harvest — a multi-story greenhouse built on the side of a parking lot — hope that one of the world's few vertical farms can help feed the town with tomatoes, herbs, and microgreens.
This morning the FCC voted 3-2 along party lines to approve new rules that enshrine the concept of net neutrality. Blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization were all explicitly banned, and the FCC extended its authority to cover the world of peering and interconnection, something companies like Netflix had been asking for...
...The reason the Internet is a worldwide mass-market phenomenon is that all the technological details are hidden from view. Someone else is taking care of it. We want strong security, but we also want companies to have access to our computers, smart devices, and data. We want someone else to manage our computers and smart phones, organize our e-mail and photos, and help us move data between our various devices.
Those "someones" will necessarily be able to violate our privacy, either by deliberately peeking at our data or by having such lax security that they're vulnerable to national intelligence agencies, cybercriminals, or both. Last week, we learned that the NSA broke into the Dutch company Gemalto andstole the encryption keys for billions yes, billions of cell phones worldwide. That was possible because we consumers don't want to do the work of securely generating those keys and setting up our own security when we get our phones; we want it done automatically by the phone manufacturers. We want our data to be secure, but we want someone to be able to recover it all when we forget our password.
We'll never solve these security problems as long as we're our own worst enemy. That's why I believe that any long-term security solution will not only be technological, but political as well...
A Syrian Christian group representing several NGOs inside and outside the country said it had verified at least 150 people missing, including women and the elderly, who had been kidnapped by the militants.
"We have verified at least 150 people who have been adducted from sources on the ground," Bassam Ishak, president of the Syriac National Council of Syria, whose family itself is from Hasaka, told Reuters from Amman.
Earlier the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 90 were abducted when the militants carried out dawn raids on rural villages inhabited by the ancient Christian minority west of Hasaka, a city mainly held by the Kurds.
The last round of voter restrictions came after the 2010 Republican wave, when new GOP majorities passed voter identification laws and slashed ballot access in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. Now, three months after the 2014 Republican wave, another class of state lawmakers are prepping another assault on voting rights under the same guise of “uniformity” and “ballot integrity.”
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It’s always worth noting the scant evidence for these moves. In Missouri, for instance, the Brennan Center found only four cases of in-person voter fraud, for a “documented fraud rate” of 0.0003 percent. There is no problem to solve; the policy rationale for limiting registration drives or requiring photo identification—instead of a standard-issue registration card—doesn’t exist. And if it did, there’s no reason for a restrictive approach; automatic registration and free ID cards are just as effective as anything proposed by state and federal Republicans.
Politically, however, there’s a lot to gain from these laws. Every new barrier to voting makes it harder for the most marginal voters to get to the polls. And given the demographics of voting—the least frequent voters are poorer, browner, and less educated than their most frequent counterparts—it’s in the Republican Party’s interest to shrink the electorate as much as possible.
A democratically elected government is only as good as those willing to stand for its offices. Yet polls suggest that many of us believe the country is a nearly hopeless mess — with trust in government at historical lows after steady decline over the past decade, and with Congress’ approval rating hovering around that of Nickleback and cockroaches. There are many reasons for the sorry state of national politics. My research suggests one important reason: the reluctance of good candidates to run for office, particularly young people.
Young people’s views of government mirror the nation as a whole. The Harvard IOP poll of 18- to 29-year-olds shows a 10-point decrease in trust of the federal government from 2000 to 2012. A majority of millennials (52 percent) now say they would choose to recall all members of Congress, were it possible. My research suggests that the problem goes even further: not only are capable young people are repelled by what they see of politics, they are extremely skeptical about politics as a way of effecting positive change.
Between 2011 and 2014, I surveyed over 750 young people well-positioned to run for office – those studying law and public policy at the graduate level in the Boston area. The views of one such person, whom I’ll call Charlotte, are illustrative. She said, “I’d hate [running].” She elaborated: “I just feel I can effect a lot more change and do good work from the outside and find it much more satisfying.”
Other interviewees added heartfelt outbursts about the lack of privacy for public officials and their families, and burden of constant fund raising. Dave explained: “I… [would] risk capture by going into a political process as corrupted, and sclerotic, and generally putrescent as the American one, so full of money.”