What Mass Killers Really Have in Common →

But if Trump and Gingrich are truly looking to stem terrorism and mass violence of the sort that happened in Nice, they might do better to look to a different kind of litmus test: domestic violence and grievances against women. Early reports suggest that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a rented truck through a crowd of Bastille Day revelers on Thursday night, killing more than 80 including at least ten children, may not have been devout, but he did have a criminal record of domestic violence. A neighbor claimed he would “rant about his wife,” who left him two years ago.
This history of domestic violence puts Bouhlel in the horrific company of many mass murderers. Omar Mateen, who last month killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a mass shooting at an Orlando gay club, had an extensive history of domestic abuse. His former wife has claimed that in addition to taking her paychecks and forbidding her from leaving the house, Mateen also beat her if she failed to live up to traditional wifely responsibilities.
And before anyone jumps to the conclusion that killers with Muslim backgrounds have uniquely bad histories with women, recall that Robert Lewis Dear, the devout Christian who killed three people and wounded nine at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic in November, had a lengthy history of violence against women, including a 1992 arrest for rape and sexual violence. According to the Washington Post, two of his three ex-wives had accused him of domestic abuse.
When Elliot Rodger went on a shooting rampage in Southern California in 2014, killing seven, including himself, he left a video in which he detailedhis fury, particularly at women who had rejected him. “I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it …You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male.”
Dylann Roof’s racist massacre of nine churchgoers in Charleston last year was tinged with a sense of patriarchal control over women:...

Machine Bias →

Predictive software is very new. Techniques have been around for decades, but only now is computing powerful and cheap enough to use outside government and big corporations. Not surprisingly, a lot of people who are new to it are making a lot of mistakes. And it's one thing if you're Amazon and you miss a few sales. But it's another if you're a company making software to "predict" where crime will happen, and the data you rely on to create your algorithms is racially and/or economically biased. All of the sudden, you're reinforcing an unjust situation.

"Computer algorithm" does not automatically mean "unbiased".

The End of the End of the Library →

...That is, these places aren’t necessarily surging because of the books in the newfangled libraries, but because of everything else these spaces can now offer. And that’s exactly how I thought these places would possibly survive.
...Libraries are seemingly doing what it takes to transform into the communal spaces they always have been, but no longer solely wrapped around the physical book as they have been in the past. They’re morphing to be just as much about technology and classes — even art.
 

Real-World Security and the Internet of Things →

Classic information security is a triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. You'll see it called "CIA," which admittedly is confusing in the context of national security. But basically, the three things I can do with your data are steal it (confidentiality), modify it (integrity), or prevent you from getting it (availability).
...
On the Internet of Things, integrity and availability threats are much worse than confidentiality threats. It's one thing if your smart door lock can be eavesdropped upon to know who is home. It's another thing entirely if it can be hacked to allow a burglar to open the door -- or prevent you from opening your door. A hacker who can deny you control of your car, or take over control, is much more dangerous than one who can eavesdrop on your conversations or track your car's location.
With the advent of the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems in general, we've given the Internethands and feet: the ability to directly affect the physical world. What used to be attacks against data and information have become attacks against flesh, steel, and concrete.
Today's threats include hackers crashing airplanes by hacking into computer networks, and remotely disabling cars, either when they're turned off and parked or while they're speeding down the highway. We're worried about manipulated counts from electronic voting machines, frozen water pipes through 

The US is safer than ever — and Americans don’t have any idea →

There is half as much crime in the US right now as there was about 25 years ago. Both violent and property crime have declined pretty steadily since the early 1990s.
But Americans are more concerned about crime now than they have been since 2001.
That's because Americans keep thinking that crime rates are going up. At any given time, between half and three-quarters of them will say that there's more crime in America than there was last year.

Gun Deaths in America →

A lot of people are killed with guns in the U.S. every year, as you can see from the interactive chart. Fixing this will require a range of policies, some which may help overall, others which will be specific to their problem.

Violence and the racialized failure of the American state →

The refusal of grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York, to indict the police officers that killed Michael Brown and Eric Gardner has led some conservative commentators to direct attention to the so-called “Black on Black” crime problem, a much greater threat to Blacks than the police. The reaction from advocates for racial progress is to reject such attempts to connect these phenomenon, and to re-focus attention on state violence.
This is a mistake. The use of lethal force against Black Americans by the police or the state more generally, should not be untethered from the heightened risk of criminal violence that Blacks experience. Doing so simply reinforces the assumption that the primary tool for ameliorating racial inequality is to further constrain the state, which exercises its criminal justice authority disproportionately against African-Americans.
But this view misses the larger problem of racial inequality in the U.S., which is the failure of the state to act affirmatively to successfully protect Blacks, to the same degree as whites, from a wide range of causes of early death. Understanding the link between the disproportionate exposure of Black Americans to one of these causes – murder – as well as to state violence reveals a far more tragic reality than a singular focus on the police suggests, and that is the racialized failure of the American state...

The Costs of Monopoly: A New View →

Economists overwhelmingly agree that the actual costs of monopoly are small, even trivial. This consensus is based on a theory that assumes monopolies are well-run businesses that limit their output in order to drive up prices and maximize profit. And because empirical studies have found that monopolists do not restrict output or raise prices by very much, most economists have concluded that monopolies inflict relatively little harm on the economy.
In this essay, I review recent research that upends both the theoretical and empirical elements of this consensus view. This research shows that monopolies are not well-run businesses, but instead are deeply inefficient. Monopolies do drive up prices, as conventional theory suggests, but because they also reduce productivity, they often ultimately destroy most of an industry’s profits. These productivity losses are a dead-weight loss for the economy, and far from trivial.
The new research also shows that monopolists typically increase prices by using political machinery to limit the output of competing products—usually by blocking low-cost substitutes. By limiting supply of these competing products, the monopolist drives up demand for its own. Thus, in contrast to conventional theory, the monopolist actually produces more of its own product than it would in a competitive market, not less. But because production of the substitutes is restricted, total output falls.
The reduction in productivity exacts a toll on all of society. But the blocking of low-cost substitutes particularly harms the poor, who might not be able to afford the monopolist’s product. Thus, monopolies drive the poor out of many markets.