Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.
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Age-dependent effects in the transmission and control of COVID-19 epidemics | Nature Me... - 0 views
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, we disentangle the relative contributions of three potential drivers of the observed distribution of clinical cases by age. We present a summary of the main findings, limitations and implications of
Severe undercounting of COVID-19 cases in U.S., other countries estimated via model - 0 views
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A new machine-learning framework uses reported test results and death rates to calculate estimates of the actual number of current COVID-19 infections within all 50 U.S. states and 50 countries. Jungsik Noh and Gaudenz Danuser of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 8,
Study identifies significance of atmospheric rivers for New Zealand - 0 views
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Atmospheric rivers are narrow corridors of concentrated moisture in the atmosphere. On average there are only three to five atmospheric rivers present in each hemisphere, covering just 10 percent of the globe's mid-latitude circumference but accounting for 90 percent of moisture transport in the same region.
Questionnaire data analysis using information geometry | Scientific Reports - 0 views
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The analysis of questionnaires often involves representing the high-dimensional responses in a low-dimensional space (e.g., PCA, MCA, or t-SNE). However questionnaire data often contains categorical variables and common statistical model assumptions rarely hold. Here we present a non-parametric approach based on Fisher Information which obtains a low-dimensional embedding of a statistical manifold (SM). The SM has deep connections with parametric statistical models and the theory of phase transitions in statistical physics. Firstly we simulate questionnaire responses based on a non-linear SM and validate our method compared to other methods. Secondly we apply our method to two empirical datasets containing largely categorical variables: an anthropological survey of rice farmers in Bali and a cohort study on health inequality in Amsterdam. Compare to previous analysis and known anthropological knowledge we conclude that our method best discriminates between different behaviours, paving the way to dimension reduction as effective as for continuous data.
Long-term thinking and coronavirus - I'm Late to This - 0 views
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How supposed long-term thinking renders the present indecipherable and dangerous
Jane Jacobs's Theories on Urban Planning-and Democracy in America - The Atlantic - 0 views
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I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.
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Her 1,500-word speech, a version of which appears in Vital Little Plans, became the basis for The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her main argument was Kirk’s: Small neighborhood stores, ignored by the planners in their grim demolition derby, were essential social hubs. She added that sidewalks, stoops, laundries, and mailbox areas were also indispensable centers of community activity, and that sterile, vacant outdoor space served nobody. “The least we can do,” she said, “is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own.”
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Rebuilding our Civic Muscles - 0 views
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Voting in elections every four years is not enough. Sometimes, working in policy makes me forget the value of direct service and volunteering. There are civic institutions throughout each and every community, from homeless shelters to schools and community centers, that need support. These spaces present us with countless opportunities for direct human interaction, and they allow us to strengthen our communities in the process. Use your hands to make something. Civic organizations provide critical infrastructure in our communities.
How were 1.5 billion acres of land so rapidly stolen? | Aeon Essays - 0 views
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Good history makes for good citizens. A history that glosses over the conquest of the continent is partial, in both senses of the word. It misleads people about the past and misinforms their debates about the present. In charting a course for the future, Americans would do well to put the dispossession of native peoples back on the map.
Financialization impedes climate change mitigation: Evidence from the early American so... - 0 views
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Finance is an essential component of industrial change because it allows technologies to be developed before they can generate a return. But if finance no longer serves industrial change but instead prioritizes rent-seeking (seeking to increase its share of existing wealth without creating new sources of wealth), creative destruction of the present carbon-intensive industrial system cannot occur. The aim of this article is to investigate this issue through a study of the emergence of one low-carbon industry, solar photovoltaics (PV) in the United States. The focus is on the period after the first oil shock in 1973 until the end of the 1980s. The case is contrasted with the more successful development of the industry in Japan. In the late 1970s, American firms held 90% of the global market share; by 2005, it had declined to under 10%, whereas the Japanese share had risen to almost 50% (9). Changes to corporate governance and organization brought by financialization are identified as major causes of the difference in outcome.
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One camp consisted of a small number of entrepreneurs who had been involved in producing solar cells for the space program or pioneered their application on Earth.
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The other camp consisted of the energy policy bureaucracy and closely affiliated large manufacturing and energy corporations along with utilities (65).
Materials for Two Theories: TIMN and STA-C: Overview of social evolution (past, present... - 0 views
What does home mean if your bed is on the pavements of Paris? | Aeon Essays - 0 views
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The American anthropologist Edward Fischer, paraphrasing Aristotle, said that the good life is ‘a life worth living’, or a journey towards ‘a fulfilled life’. It has to do with happiness but is not limited to it; it’s often – perhaps counterintuitively – linked to commitment and sacrifice, to the work of becoming a particular person. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1982 described these practices as technologies of the self. According to Foucault, the self is ‘not given to us … we have to create ourselves as a work of art’. My informants on the streets of Paris were striving – in their own ways – towards being better selves. I came to understand the activities, processes and routines that they engaged in – begging, making a shelter, accessing temporary housing, etc – as practices of the self geared towards a better life, as practices of homemaking on the street, as practices of hope.
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Aside from François, others I met on the streets of Paris – such as Sabal from India, and Alex from Kosovo – talked about their engagement in such practices of hope. Following them through soup kitchens, drop-in centres, government institutions and homeless shelters, I observed two main ways in which they attempted to push for a better life. Both of them were connected to the idea of home: my informants in Paris were longing to find and go back to a homeland, often one from the past, while on a daily basis they were struggling to construct a home in order to survive. That was what a better life looked like for them.
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Home, according to the Australian social scientist Shelley Mallett, is always suspended between the ideal and the real. It relates to ‘the activity performed by, with or in person’s things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now.’ While Sabal’s India was part of the ideal, what Alex was dealing with was closer to the ‘real’ side of this distinction. His home-making efforts were a continuous process of daily activities.
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You Have Permission to Take a Media Break - 0 views
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The things that you don’t want to miss are found in your family, with your community and friends. It’s shared meals and laughter and hugs and a baby’s first word or first step. It’s real life. It’s being present for someone in the real world, to comfort them or help them in a moment of need.
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And those things you don’t want to miss in real life are all rooted in Love.
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Yes, it’s important to be informed. But at the end of your life, I suspect you won’t be glad for all the hours you spent scrolling through Twitter or the New York Times app. No one, on their deathbed, says, “I’m so glad for the time I wasted on Twitter scrolling through half-baked ideas, bad jokes, conspiracy, and hate speech.”
Toward Democratic, Lawful Citizenship for AIs, Robots, and Corporations - 0 views
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If an AI canread the laws of a country (its Constitution and then relevant portions of the legal code)answer common-sense questions about these lawswhen presented with textual descriptions or videos of real-life situations, explain roughly what the laws imply about these situationsthen this AI has the level of understanding needed to manage the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
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AI citizens would also presumably have responsibilities similar to those of human citizens, though perhaps with appropriate variations. Clearly, AI citizens would have tax obligations (and corporations already pay taxes, obviously, even though they are not considered autonomous citizens). If they also served on jury duty, this could be interesting, as they might provide a quite different perspective to human citizens. There is a great deal to be fleshed out here.
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The question becomes: What kind of test can we give to validate that the AI really understands the Constitution, as opposed to just parroting back answers in a shallow but accurate way?
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It wasn't just hate. Fascism offered robust social welfare - Sheri Berman | Aeon Ideas - 0 views
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There can be no question that violence and racism were essential traits of fascism. But for most Italians, Germans and other European fascists, the appeal was based not on racism, much less ethnic cleansing, but on the fascists’ ability to respond effectively to crises of capitalism when other political actors were not. Fascists insisted that states could and should control capitalism, that the state should and could promote social welfare, and that national communities needed to be cultivated. The fascist solution ultimately was, of course, worse than the problem. In response to the horror of fascism, in part, New Deal Democrats in the United States, and social democratic parties in Europe, also moved to re-negotiate the social contract. They promised citizens that they would control capitalism and provide social welfare policies and undertake other measures to strengthen national solidarity – but without the loss of freedom and democracy that fascism entailed.
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The lesson for the present is clear: you can’t beat something with nothing. If other political actors don’t come up with more compelling solutions to the problems of capitalism, the popular appeal of the resurgent Right-wing will continue. And then the analogy with fascism and democratic collapse of the interwar years might prove even more relevant than it is now.
Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that's because we're a post-truth species. - 0 views
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A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.
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The truth is, truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. False stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. If the chief says the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, only true loyalists will clap their hands. Similarly, if all your neighbors believe the same outrageous tale, you can count on them to stand together in times of crisis. If they are willing to believe only accredited facts, what does that prove?
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Yet the difference between holy books and money is far smaller than it might seem. When most people see a dollar bill, they forget that it is just a human convention. As they see the green piece of paper with the picture of the dead white man, they see it as something valuable in and of itself. They hardly ever remind themselves, “Actually, this is a worthless piece of paper, but because other people view it as valuable, I can make use of it.” If you observed a human brain in an fMRI scanner, you would see that as someone is presented with a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills, the parts of the brain that start buzzing with excitement are not the skeptical parts but the greedy parts. Conversely, in the vast majority of cases people begin to sanctify the Bible or the Vedas only after long and repeated exposure to others who view it as sacred. We learn to respect holy books in exactly the same way we learn to respect paper currency.
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High score, low pay: why the gig economy loves gamification | Business | The Guardian - 0 views
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Simply defined, gamification is the use of game elements – point-scoring, levels, competition with others, measurable evidence of accomplishment, ratings and rules of play – in non-game contexts. Games deliver an instantaneous, visceral experience of success and reward, and they are increasingly used in the workplace to promote emotional engagement with the work process, to increase workers’ psychological investment in completing otherwise uninspiring tasks, and to influence, or “nudge”, workers’ behaviour.
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According to Burawoy, production at Allied was deliberately organised by management to encourage workers to play the game. When work took the form of a game, Burawoy observed, something interesting happened: workers’ primary source of conflict was no longer with the boss. Instead, tensions were dispersed between workers (the scheduling man, the truckers, the inspectors), between operators and their machines, and between operators and their own physical limitations (their stamina, precision of movement, focus). The battle to beat the quota also transformed a monotonous, soul-crushing job into an exciting outlet for workers to exercise their creativity, speed and skill. Workers attached notions of status and prestige to their output, and the game presented them with a series of choices throughout the day, affording them a sense of relative autonomy and control. It tapped into a worker’s desire for self-determination and self-expression. Then, it directed that desire towards the production of profit for their employer.
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Former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris has also described how the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism used in most social media feeds mimics the clever architecture of a slot machine: users never know when they are going to experience gratification – a dozen new likes or retweets – but they know that gratification will eventually come. This unpredictability is addictive: behavioural psychologists have long understood that gambling uses variable reinforcement schedules – unpredictable intervals of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback – to condition players into playing just one more round.
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'Forget the Facebook leak': China is mining data directly from workers' brains on an in... - 0 views
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The technology is in widespread use around the world but China has applied it on an unprecedented scale in factories, public transport, state-owned companies and the military to increase the competitiveness of its manufacturing industry and to maintain social stability.
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Jin said that at present China’s brain-reading technology was on a par with that in the West but China was the only country where there had been reports of massive use of the technology in the workplace.
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With improved speed and sensitivity, the device could even become a “mental keyboard” allowing the user to control a computer or mobile phone with their mind.
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