No-Fly List Uses Predictive Assessments →

The US government has admitted that it uses predictive assessments to put people on the no-fly list:
In a little-noticed filing before an Oregon federal judge, the US Justice Department and the FBI conceded that stopping US and other citizens from travelling on airplanes is a matter of "predictive assessments about potential threats," the government asserted in May.
When you have a secret process that can judge and penalize people without due process or oversight, this is the kind of thing that happens.

The V.A.’s Woman Problem →

Of the almost 22 million veterans in the United States today, more than two million are women, and of those, over 635,000 are enrolled in the Department of Veterans Affairs system, double the number before 9/11. Women are the fastest growing group of veterans treated by the V.A., and projections show that women will make up over 16 percent of the country’s veterans by midcentury.
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Unfortunately, these veterans aren’t always getting the care they require from a system originally designed to serve mostly men. Women have health care needs that are distinct from men; cardiovascular disease, for example, plays out differently in the female body, and particular expertise is required when providers see women in their childbearing years. “For too long, the V.A. has essentially ignored many of the most pressing needs that our women veterans face,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said during a hearing held by the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year.
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The problem is not will, it’s money. The V.A. has to care for all living veterans, and has encountered increased demand on every front, from nursing home beds to mental health care. The demographic challenge is daunting: dealing with a large population of aging Vietnam veterans just as over one million veterans are making the transition from the military back into civilian life, most after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Yes, increased funds will be needed,” says Dr. Sally Haskell, the V.A.’s deputy chief consultant for women’s health services. “We need to work to make sure that women veterans are being taken care of.”
But leaders of the V.A. have to choose between competing priorities. This summer, for example, they obtained extra funds to provide new drugs for hepatitis C, which is rampant among Vietnam veterans, after threatening to close facilities unless the dollars came through. They did not employ the same strong-arm tactics to obtain additional funding for new services for the young women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Science Isn’t Broken: It’s just a hell of a lot harder than we give it credit for. →

Really neat article. Looks at the problems with one of the most common modern statistics. A small window into the world of science.

...Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But I’ve spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and I’ve learned that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard — really fucking hard.
If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result. I could pontificate about all the reasons why science is arduous, but instead I’m going to let you experience one of them for yourself. Welcome to the wild world of p-hacking...

The Bail Trap →

Bail hasn’t always been a mechanism for locking people up. When the concept first took shape in England during the Middle Ages, it was emancipatory. Rather than detaining people indefinitely without trial, magistrates were required to let defendants go free before seeing a judge, guaranteeing their return to court with a bond. If the defendant failed to return, he would forfeit the amount of the bond. The bond might be secured — that is, with some or all of the amount of the bond paid in advance and returned at the end of the trial — or it might not. In 1689, the English Bill of Rights outlawed the widespread practice of keeping defendants in jail by setting deliberately unaffordable bail, declaring that ‘‘excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed.’’ The same language was adopted word for word a century later in the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
But as bail has evolved in America, it has become less and less a tool for keeping people out of jail, and more and more a trap door for those who cannot afford to pay it. Unsecured bond has become vanishingly rare, and in most jurisdictions, there are only two ways to make bail: post the entire amount yourself up front — what’s called ‘‘money bail’’ or ‘‘cash bail’’ — or pay a commercial bail bondsman to do so. For relatively low bail amounts — say, below $2,000, the range in which most New York City bails fall — the second option often doesn’t even exist; bondsmen can’t make enough money from such small bails to make it worth their while.
With national attention suddenly focused on the criminal-justice system, bail has been cited as an easy target for reformers. But ensuring that no one is held in jail based on poverty would, in many respects, necessitate a complete reordering of criminal justice. The open secret is that in most jurisdictions, bail is the grease that keeps the gears of the overburdened system turning. Faced with the prospect of going to jail for want of bail, many defendants accept plea deals instead, sometimes at their arraignments. New York City courts processed 365,000 arraignments in 2013; well under 5 percent of those cases went all the way to a trial resolution. If even a small fraction of those defendants asserted their right to a trial, criminal courts would be overwhelmed. By encouraging poor defendants to plead guilty, bail keeps the system afloat.

The Plight of Refugees, the Shame of the World →

The world is facing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II, a staggering 60 million people displaced from their homes, four million from Syria alone. World leaders have abdicated their responsibility for this unlucky population, around half of whom are children.
The situation is sadly reminiscent of that of refugees fleeing the destruction of World War II and the Nazi onslaught. Then, too, most governments turned their backs, and millions who were trapped perished.
We are mired in a set of myopic, stingy and cruel policies. The few global institutions dedicated to supporting this population are starved of resources as governments either haven’t funded them or have reneged on their pledges of funds. Wealthy and powerful nations aren’t doing their part; the United States, for example, has taken fewer than 1,000 refugees from Syria...

US gives Shell the final approval it needs to drill for oil in the Arctic →

The US government has given Royal Dutch Shell the final approval it needs to drill for oil below the Arctic Ocean floor, off Alaska's northwest coast. Shell plans to drill two exploration wells before late September, when the open-water season ends.
US officials approved the permit after Shell bought technology that should help avoid well blowouts. Shell had previously only been allowed to drill the top sections of the two wells located in the Chukchi Sea because an important piece of equipment — called the "capping stack" — needed to be repaired in Portland, Oregon, reports the Associated Press. Now that the icebreaker carrying the equipment has made it to Alaska, Shell is free to drill at about 8,000 feet below the ocean floor for the first time in over 20 years.

Syrian army bombards Douma as air raid toll rises: monitor →

The Syrian military bombarded an area northeast of Damascus on Monday, keeping up its attack on a rebel-held district where around 100 people were killed on Sunday in an air strike on a market, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Sunday's air strike on Douma, 10 miles (15 km) northeast of Damascus, was one of the bloodiest attacks of its type in the four-year-long war that has killed an estimated quarter of a million people and driven 10 million from their homes.

Parable of the Polygons →

Cute way of visualizing how small, "harmless choices can make a harmful world," and what it takes to fix it.