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Elizabeth Merritt

Heatwaves Are Shutting Down Data Centers, Breaking the Internet - 2 views

  • Despite heat waves becoming a common occurrence globally, companies such as Twitter are grossly underprepared for the havoc that intense heat can wreak on the technology industry.
  • backup generators and external power equipment can also be affected by heat waves
Elizabeth Merritt

How Germany Changed Its Mind, and Gave Benin Bronzes Back to Nigeria - The New York Times - 4 views

  • by a changing social consensus about the ethics of holding on to such items, and further strengthened by a backlash against Germany’s flagship cultural project: the Humboldt Forum,
  • Germany’s approach also contrasts with those of the United States and British governments, which have left decisions up to individual institutions
  • some of the most important museums in England cannot return their Benin Bronzes, even if they wanted to, without a change in the law. That includes the British Museum, which owns about 900 of the artifacts, arguably the world’s finest collection.
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  • a key turning point there occurred in 2019, amid growing public pressure.
  • a rising awareness in Germany of its own colonial crimes — including the killing of tens of thousands of Nama and Herero people in what is now Namibia. The atrocity, carried out between 1904 and 1908, is widely seen as the first genocide of the 20th century.
  • Until then, the main vehicle for discussing the return of the Benin Bronzes had been the Benin Dialogue Group, a network founded in 2010 that brought together Nigerian representatives and figures from European museums with bronzes in their collections. The group, however, favored loans over transfers of ownership.
  • The agreement stipulated that all objects that had been obtained “unethically” would be liable for return and directed institutions to facilitate claims by producing publicly available inventories.
  • obstacles remained on the Nigerian side. Although the country had requested the return of the bronzes since the 1970s, there was conflict over who would take ownership of the artifacts. Both the Nigerian government and the oba of Benin, whose family ruled the historical Kingdom of Benin from which they were looted, claimed that they owned the items. Godwin Obaseki, the governor of Edo State, where Benin City is, said he acted as a facilitator to resolve the dispute.
  • Ultimately, he said, the oba’s family, Nigeria’s museum commission and the government of Edo State agreed to join a trust together, with independent directors that oversee the construction and operation of the new museum.
  • the agreement allows for 168 pieces chosen by Nigeria’s museum commission to remain in Germany “so that Benin’s art can be shown to the world.” The approximately 350 other bronzes that were part of the Berlin museum collections will be transported to Nigeria once the pavilion is completed.
  • Edo Museum of West African Art
  • It remains unclear who will pay for the shipment and insurance of the remaining items in Germany, and he noted that the bronzes’ storage and upkeep will come at a considerable cost, including electrical bills for climate control.
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    The foreign minister's trip is the culmination of a yearslong process that upended Germany's approach to handling cultural items unjustly obtained during the colonial period. It is also part of a pioneering model for large-scale restitution, in which ownership is swapped before any artifacts change hands. Crucially, that approach allows for items to be restituted even if the country of origin does not yet have the facilities to store and exhibit them.
Elizabeth Merritt

A Texas superintendent ordered school librarians to remove LGBTQ books. Now the federal... - 1 views

  • The U.S. Education Department’s civil rights enforcement arm has launched an investigation into a North Texas school district whose superintendent was secretly recorded ordering librarians to remove LGBTQ-themed library books.
  • accused the district of violating a federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender. The ACLU complaint was based largely on an investigation published in March by NBC News, ProPublica and the Tribune that revealed that Granbury’s superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, instructed librarians to remove books dealing with sexual orientation and people who are transgender.
  • An Education Department spokesperson confirmed the investigation and said it was related to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits schools from discriminating on the basis of sex, gender and sexual orientation.
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  • After a volunteer review committee voted to return all but a few of the titles, two disgruntled members of the committee filed a police report in May accusing district employees of providing “pornography” to children, triggering a monthslong criminal investigation by Hood County Constable Chad Jordan, which remained open as of August.
  • The ACLU of Texas made similar legal arguments in another civil rights complaint filed last month against the Keller Independent School District in North Texas in response to a policy banning any books that mention “gender fluidity.” The Education Department has yet to decide whether to open an investigation in Keller,
  • the nonprofit PEN America, which has tracked thousands of school book bans since last year,
  • If the Education Department finds Carroll students’ rights have been violated, experts said, the federal agency could require the district to implement the same types of diversity and inclusion training programs that conservative activists have fought to block in Southlake.
Elizabeth Merritt

Mastodon Isn't Just A Replacement For Twitter - 1 views

  • We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.
  • he challenge and the opportunity of spaces like the fediverse is that it is up to us which rules we want to follow and how we make rules for ourselves.
  • We believe that it is time to embrace the old idea of subsidiarity, which dates back to early Calvinist theology and Catholic social teaching. The European Union’s founding documents use the term, too. It means that in a large and interconnected system, people in a local community should have the power to address their own problems. Some decisions are made at higher levels, but only when necessary. Subsidiarity is about achieving the right balance between local units and the larger systems.
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  • On Social.coop, we don’t just post and comment about what’s on our minds; we also decide on our moderation practices and enact them through committees. The Community Working Group handles conflict resolution through accountability processes. Its members are paid with funds from our sliding-scale member dues. The Tech Working Group maintains our servers, while the Finance Working Group keeps an eye on our budget. Any member can propose new activities and policies, and we can all vote on them according to the bylaws. We adjust Mastodon’s moderation settings as we see fit.
  • a number of servers organized to collectively ban those that harbored white supremacists, like Gab, from the rest of the fediverse — even if it remained active on the network, most people using Mastodon would never see Gab users’ posts.
Elizabeth Merritt

ESG: How boards and CEOs can play offense instead of defense - 0 views

Elizabeth Merritt

Who Is Working to End the Threat of AI-Generated Deepfakes - 0 views

  • ata poisoning techniques to essentially disturb pixels within an image to create invisible noise, effectively making AI art generators incapable of generating realistic deepfakes based on the photos they’re fed.
  • Higher resolution images work even better, he said, since they include more pixels that can be minutely disturbed.
  • Google is creating its own AI image generator called Imagen, though few people have been able to put their system through its paces. The company is also working on a generative AI video system.
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  • Salman said he could imagine a future where companies, even the ones who generate the AI models, could certify that uploaded images are immunized against AI models. Of course, that isn’t much good news for the millions of images already uploaded to the open source library like LAION, but it could potentially make a difference for any image uploaded in the future.
  • there are some AI systems that can detect deepfake videos, and there are ways to train people to detect the small inconsistencies that show a video is being faked. The question is: will there come a time when neither human nor machine can discern if a photo or video has been manipulated?
  • Back in September, OpenAI announced users could once again upload human faces to their system, but claimed they had built in ways to stop users from showing faces in violent or sexual contexts. It also asked users not to upload images of people without their consent
  • Noah asked Murati if there was a way to make sure AI programs don’t lead us to a world “where nothing is real, and everything that’s real, isn’t?”
Elizabeth Merritt

What the research says about 4-day school weeks - MindShift - 0 views

  • (City students were excluded from the analysis because no city schools had adopted four-day weeks. Only rural, small town and suburban students were included.)
  • The switch seemed to hurt reading achievement more than math achievement.
  • Rural schools accounted for seven out of 10 schools on the four-day schedule in this study.
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  • Rural four-day students generally learned as much as rural five-day day students. Statistically, both groups’ test scores rose by about the same amount every year.
  • small town and suburban students who switched to four-day weeks were far worse off than other students in the state
  • One possible explanation, Morton says, is sports. Many rural athletes and young student fans leave school early on Fridays or skip school altogether because of the great distances to travel to away games. In effect, many five-day students are only getting four-days of instruction in rural America.
  • The four-day work week is an attractive work perk in rural America that may lure better teachers.
  • By this theory, four-day schools may make it easier to hire better teachers, who could accomplish in four days what a less skilled teacher accomplishes in five days.
  • five-day weeks have their own drawbacks in rural America: hidden absences, skipped lessons and lower quality teachers.
  • Hispanic students, who accounted for one out of every six rural students in this study, suffered much more from four-day weeks than white students did. (Native American students, who made up one of every 10 rural students, did relatively better with the four-day week.)
  • biggest surprise to me in this review of the research is how tiny the cost savings are: 1 to 2 percent.  It does save some money not to run the heat or buses one day a week, but the largest expenses, teacher salaries, stay the same.
Elizabeth Merritt

Majority of U.S. Workers Changing Jobs Are Seeing Real Wage Gains | Pew Research Center - 0 views

  • From April 2021 to March 2022, a period in which quit rates reached post-pandemic highs, the majority of workers switching jobs (60%) saw an increase in their real earnings over the same month the previous year.
  • 2.5% of workers – about 4 million – switched jobs on average each month from January to March 2022. This share translates into an annual turnover of 30% of workers – nearly 50 million – if it is assumed that no workers change jobs more than once a year. It is higher than in 2021, when 2.3% of workers switched employers each month, on average. About a third (34%) of workers who left a job from January to March 2022 – either voluntarily or involuntarily – were with a new employer the following month.
  • rom April 2020 to March 2021, some 51% of job switchers saw an increase in real earnings over the same months the previous year. On the other hand, among workers who did not change employers, the share reporting an increase in real earnings decreased from 54% over the 2020-21 period to 47% over the 2021-22 period. Put another way, the median worker who changed employers saw real gains in earnings in both periods, while the median worker who stayed in place saw a loss during the April 2021 to March 2022 period.
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  • A new Pew Research Center survey finds that about one-in-five workers (22%) say they are very or somewhat likely to look for a new job in the next six months
  • those who describe their personal financial situation as only fair or poor are about twice as likely as those who say their finances are excellent or good to say they’d consider making a job change (29% vs. 15%).
  • About half of job switchers also change their industry or occupation in a typical month, but this share has not changed since 2019. Women who leave a job are more likely than men who leave a job to take a break from the labor force, and men with children at home are least likely to do the same.
Elizabeth Merritt

Human bones, stolen art: Smithsonian tackles its 'problem' collections - The Washington... - 0 views

  • a new collections policy that requires Smithsonian museums to collaborate with the communities represented by their holdings and to return or share ownership of items that might have been previously stolen or acquired under duress.
  • The policy requires human remains “be treated with dignity and respect, as those once living, and not objectified as a scientific resource.”
  • As Smithsonian officials celebrated the deaccessioning of works held by its African Art museum, they ignored another 21 Benin sculptures in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History
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  • One floor above the African exhibit, which opened in 1999, the bones of Robert Kennicott, the famed Smithsonian explorer who once lived in the Castle, are on view.
Elizabeth Merritt

Real driverless cars are now legal in China's tech hub Shenzhen | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • The regulation, which is set to take effect on August 1, grants permission for autonomous driving vehicles to operate without a human in the driver’s seat
  • The rules also define the thorny issue of liability. When the vehicle is equipped with a driver, the driver will “be handled” by the transportation authorities in case of traffic rule violations and incidents. But if the car is completely driverless, the owner or manager of the self-driving vehicle is subject to handling by the authorities. If the accident is a result of a defect in the connected car, the owner or manager of the car can seek compensation from the manufacturer or vendor.
  • Major autonomous driving players in China have all opted for a lidar-based route instead of one that relies purely on vision tech like Tesla.
Elizabeth Merritt

Experts clash on where virtual reality sits in the Metaverse - 0 views

  • it might be five to ten years before VR becomes a Metaverse-ready item due to developer-side limitations
  • the main hurdle is the headset
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