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Bill Fulkerson

Singing in a silent spring: Birds respond to a half-century soundscape reversion during... - 0 views

science.sciencemag.org/...science.abd5777

reversion singing .covid-19 birds shutdown

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 25 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 25 Sep 20
     
    Actions taken to mitigate the threats of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to human life and welfare have inadvertently resulted in a natural experiment offering unanticipated insight into how human behavior affects animal behavior (1). Worldwide, elective quarantine and stay-at-home orders have reduced use of public spaces and transportation networks, especially in cities. Anecdotal media accounts suggest that restricted movement has elicited rarely observed behaviors in commensal and peri-urban animals (2). Though not all of the reports have proven to be accurate (3), widely publicized observations like coyotes crossing the normally heavily trafficked Golden Gate Bridge in the San Francisco (SF) Bay Area (California, USA) have provoked widespread fascination with the prospect that animals rapidly move back into landscapes recently vacated by humans.
Bill Fulkerson

Calling for benefit-risk evaluations of COVID-19 control measures - The Lancet - 0 views

www.thelancet.com/...fulltext

lockdown benefit risk

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 08 Feb 21
     
    We think government lockdowns cause substantial collateral health damage. For example, hospital admissions in the USA for emergency treatment of acute ischaemic strokes have been substantially lower in February-March, 2020, than in February-March, 2019, resulting in delayed treatment.1 Compared with a historical baseline, UK nursing homes and hospices saw an increase in the number of deaths between February and June, 2020, associated with acute coronary syndrome (a 41% increase), stroke (a 39% increase), and heart failure (a 25% increase).2
Bill Fulkerson

Offline: Science and the breakdown of trust - The Lancet - 0 views

www.thelancet.com/...fulltext

breakdown science trust

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 01 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 01 Oct 20
     
    The COVID-19 syndemic is entering its most dangerous phase. There is a mounting breakdown of trust. Not only between politicians and the public. But also among politicians and publics with science and scientists. This breach of faith with science is far more threatening. For the public is slowly turning against those who have sought to guide the political response to COVID-19. As countries face a resurgence of coronavirus transmission, scientific advisers are recommending further restrictions to our liberties. There is now a palpable public reaction against these mandates. Whereas in March people were ready to stay at home to protect their health and health systems, the growing economic emergency that has followed national lockdowns is leading politicians to resist similar measures being applied once again. And it is scientists who are targets for public opprobrium. "Britain is in the grip of mad science", wrote one commentator last week. A UK Government minister was quoted as saying that "[Boris] Johnson has been totally captured by [Chris] Whitty and [Patrick] Vallance". "Boris is now a prisoner of the scientists", ran a newspaper headline. Robert Dingwall, a professor of sociology, wrote "we have found ourselves in the han
Steve Bosserman

Facebook Will Now Start Showing You Gorier Images - 0 views

psmag.com/you-gorier-images-30421ae28571

facebook transparency documentation

shared by Steve Bosserman on 13 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • More than almost any library, Facebook may be the single greatest home for historical testimony in the history of humankind. One can only hope that, with this step, the technology company is realizing the weight of its awesome responsibility.
Steve Bosserman

The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious - Samir Chopra | Aeon E... - 0 views

aeon.co/...-is-nonsensical-and-pernicious

intellectual property

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • A general term is useful only if it subsumes related concepts in such a way that semantic value is added. If our comprehension is not increased by our chosen generalised term, then we shouldn’t use it. A common claim such as ‘they stole my intellectual property’ is singularly uninformative, since the general term ‘intellectual property’ obscures more than it illuminates. If copyright infringement is alleged, we try to identify the copyrightable concrete expression, the nature of the infringement and so on. If patent infringement is alleged, we check another set of conditions (does the ‘new’ invention replicate the design of the older one?), and so on for trademarks (does the offending symbol substantially and misleadingly resemble the protected trademark?) and trade secrets (did the enterprise attempt to keep supposedly protected information secret?) The use of the general term ‘intellectual property’ tells us precisely nothing.
  • Property is a legally constructed, historically contingent, social fact. It is founded on economic and social imperatives to distribute and manage material resources – and, thus, wealth and power. As the preface to a legal textbook puts it, legal systems of property ‘confer benefits and impose burdens’ on owners and nonowners respectively. Law defines property. It circumscribes the conditions under which legal subjects may acquire, and properly use and dispose of their property and that of others. It makes concrete the ‘natural right’ of holding property. Different sets of rules create systems with varying allocations of power for owners and others. Some grants of property rights lock in, preserve and reinforce existing relations of race, class or gender, stratifying society and creating new, entrenched, propertied classes. Law makes property part of our socially constructed reality, reconfigurable if social needs change.
  • ‘Property’ is a legal term with overwhelming emotive, expressive and rhetorical impact. It is regarded as the foundation of a culture and as the foundation of an economic system. It pervades our moral sense, our normative order. It has ideological weight and propaganda value. To use the term ‘intellectual property’ is to partake of property’s expressive impact in an economic and political order constructed by property’s legal rights. It is to suggest that if property is at play, then it can be stolen, and therefore must be protected with the same zeal that the homeowner guards her home against invaders and thieves.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • What about the common objection that without ‘intellectual property’ the proverbial starving artist would be at the mercy of giant corporations, who have existing market share and first-mover advantage? It is important to disaggregate the necessity and desirability of the protections of the various legal regimes of copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets from that of the language of ‘intellectual property’. Current copyright, patent, trade-secret and trademark law do not need to be completely rejected. Their aims are rather more modest: the reconfiguration of legal rules and protections in an economy and culture in which the nature of creative goods and how they are made, used, shared, modified and distributed has changed. Such advocacy is not against, for instance, copyright protections. Indeed, in the domain of free and open-source software, it is copyright law – through the use of artfully configured software licences that do not restrain users in the way that traditional proprietary software licences do – that protects developers and users. And neither do copyright reformers argue that plagiarists be somehow rewarded; they do not advocate that anyone should be able to take a copyrighted work, put their name on it, and sell it.
  • This public domain is ours to draw upon for future use. The granting of temporary leases to various landlords to extract monopoly rent should be recognised for what it is: a limited privilege for our benefit. The use of ‘intellectual property’ is a rhetorical move by one partner in this conversation, the one owning the supposed ‘property right’. There is no need for us to play along, to confuse one kind of property with another or, for that matter, to even consider the latter kind of object any kind of property at all. Doing so will not dismantle the elaborate structures of rules we have built in order to incentivise artistic and scientific work. Rather, it will make it possible for that work to continue.
Bill Fulkerson

Home - 0 views

peterturchin.com

turchin

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 20 Apr 18 - No Cached
Steve Bosserman

Want a more equal society? Universal Basic Income might not be the policy you are looki... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ncome-might-not-policy-looking

universal basic income

shared by Steve Bosserman on 04 May 18 - No Cached
  • Those who seek a radical departure from capitalism see UBI as part of a radical platform to move away from a world in which work is central to our lives, identities and economies. In their book Inventing the Future, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek argue that UBI is a fundamental part of delivering a new economy in which citizens have much greater freedom over when and if they work.
  • What this shows is that for UBI to be a viable proposition at these levels, there would need to be a fundamental transformation in the ownership of the economy. Williams and Srnicek acknowledge this, arguing that UBI will only work in combination with large scale and collectively owned automation, a reduction in the working week and a shift in social attitudes around the value of the ‘work ethic’.
  • Action on relative poverty is important, and inequality is not cost free. As Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson show in their book ‘The Spirit Level’, countries with higher rates of inequality perform worse against a range of social outcomes – physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • However, unless we are to engage in a radical economic transformation which drastically increases common ownership of economy, it is unlikely that Universal Basic Income on its own will do more than lock us into our current predicament. In the meantime, we need to look for equally radical policies which make a much more material difference to the lives of those on low incomes and who suffer from structural inequalities. Proponents of UBI need to go big or go home.
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