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In a Swing County in a Swing State, the Verdict Is In: It's Going to Be Close - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wing-vote-pinellas-county.html bias new york times swing
shared by adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Hillary could not win over Pinellas County the same way Obama could, she did resonate with middle-class voters. This seems to be a common theme when referring to the election in 2016. It seemed that Trump appealed to the middle class more so that Hillary.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The county also reflects the sate in terms of being a "swing"
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The county also reflects the sate in terms of being a "swing"
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Important demographic of the area
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Important demographic of the area
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • with most polls indicating that it’s anyone’s guess who will carry Florida
  • held rallies in nearby Tampa on Thursday that underlined the polar-opposite realities each candidate now inhabits:
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I like how the article highlights the way the two candidates went about trying to win a swing state like Florida. Biden being focused on Coronavirus and actual problems. While Trump went on to make Biden look bad instead of focusing on problems and policy.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I like how the article highlights the way the two candidates went about trying to win a swing state like Florida. Biden being focused on Coronavirus and actual problems. While Trump went on to make Biden look bad instead of focusing on problems and policy.
  • a conservative who said he had blocked Fox News on social media for being “too mainstream,”
  • “felt that it would be a good learning experience, so she could learn about some history and politics firsthand.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Interesting that he took his daughter out of school to be apart of history. It makes me think about the question of "what side of history do you want to be on?"
  • Does he have a locker-room mentality?
  • “Yeah, sure, but I’m not hiring him to be nice.”
  • once overshadowed by Clearwater’s beach-retirement hub — has been transformed by recent years that have brought a mix of gentrification and progressive politics.
  • get-out-the-vote rally in honor of Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and voting rights champion who died over the summer
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      It is so interesting how areas so close to each other are so drastically different in politics and beliefs.
  • One in five Black Floridians is thought to have a felony conviction and could be unable to vote because of it.
  • “I’m not encouraging anyone to break the law, but today is a day for some ‘good trouble,’” she added, using one of Mr. Lewis’s signature phrases from his civil rights struggles
  • Mr. Overcast sighed. He said that living in the same county as the Church of Scientology’s headquarters had taught him how to tolerate almost any point of view, even that of the neighbor, who he suspected had stolen the Trump sign from his lawn.Mr. Overcast said his home security system had filmed the culprit making off with it. But rather than confront the neighbor, Mr. Overcast just bought another sign.“But with this one I tied 90 pounds of fishing line on it and tied it to a tree in my yard,” he said.
  • Billy Overcast — “spelled like the weather,” said Mr. Overcast, pointing up, however, to a typically clear day with one hand, a “Trump 2020” flag in the other.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Once again so close but so drastically different
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      He is showing his beliefs even though the majority of his club fly Trump flags, not Biden flags. The picture at the beginning of the article shows how much pride he has for his beliefs
  • Clearwater
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Interesting how they are comparing Florida being a swing state to the flying of flags on jeeps
  • The Confederate flag also bothered him, he told his fellow Jeep enthusiasts, as did the systemic racism
  • decorated with red, white and blue balloons; an American flag; a Black Lives Matter flag; another flag with an L.G.B.T. rainbow he found on Amazon; and lots of Biden-Harris campaign paraphernalia.
  • St. Petersburg and conservative Clearwater, the vacation hub and base of the Church of Scientology.
  • in the swing state that crowned past presidents by small margins, much in this country is riding o
  • n the all-important question of who flies what flag on which Jeep.
  • Pinellas County, about three-quarters of which is white, includes a good number of older retirees and suburban women
  • favor Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee.
  • 256,000 are registered as Democrats
  • 252,000 as Republicans.
  • a swing county in a swing state
  • Donald J. Trump narrowly triumphed here by roughly 6,000 votes, out of about half a million cast
  • But postelection observers said her appeals to middle-class voters in Pinellas County didn’t resonate as well as Mr. Obama’s had.
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In Georgia County, Elections Bills Have Consequences : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...ctions-bills-have-consequences Georgia Ellections racism bias
shared by cvanderloo on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Long before Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a 98-page law that enacted drastic changes to election rules in Georgia this week, some lawmakers were already facing pushback amid an inflamed debate over voting rights.
  • Hancock County is about 100 miles east of Atlanta and one of the poorest in the country.
  • "He knows how important absentee voting and early voting is to this community," he said. "And he goes and introduces legislation to make it harder, more difficult for the very people to vote that are paying him as county attorney!"
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  • Thornton said he believes that an attorney should be an advocate, not an adversary, and others agree
  • One bill Fleming introduced, HB 531, would have curbed Sunday early voting, restricted mail-in voting, even made handing out food and water to voters a misdemeanor crime.
  • Fleming was county attorney that year when about 20% of Sparta's voters — all Black — had their voter registrations challenged before a mayoral race.
  • While Republicans have proposed hundreds of restrictive bills across the country, Warren says the particular measures discussed in Georgia are personal for Black people like himself that experienced Jim Crow laws firsthand.
  • Warren said Facebook posts and meetings with community members helped mobilize action before the county commission, and now says other local jurisdictions that have hired Fleming as attorney are considering dropping him, too.
  • In the short term at least, it appears that some Republicans are paying attention. The bill signed into law Thursday reversed course on some of the harshest measures, keeping no-excuse absentee voting and actually expanding in-person early voting access.
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Officials confirm 1st case of coronavirus in Sacramento County; patient in isolation | ... - 0 views

fox40.com/...to-county-patient-in-isolation
shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KTXL) -- The first case of novel coronavirus has been confirmed in Sacramento County, county health officials said Friday.
  • The adult patient returned from China to the United States on Feb. 2, according to a release from Sacramento County Public Health Services.
  • "The individual took precautionary measures during travel and has self-quarantined since returning.
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You Want Compromise? Sure You Do - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nt-compromise-sure-you-do.html political cluster compromise trade-off agreement radical
shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • THROUGHOUT the debt-ceiling debacle, poll after poll has shown that Americans want politicians in Washington to compromise.
  • why is compromise so hard to achieve?
  • “Americans are self-segregating,” said Bill Bishop, author of “The Big Sort,” a 2008 book that examined, in the words of its subtitle, “why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart.”
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  • Mr. Bishop said Americans now choose “in their neighborhoods and their churches, to be around others who live like they do and think like they do — and, every four years, vote like they do.”
  • All this adds up to a kind of political echo chamber, in which like-minded thinkers reinforce one other.
  • He tested his thesis with an examination of the shifting geography of presidential politics, beginning in 1976, when Jimmy Carter won the presidency by the slimmest of margins, with 50.1 percent of the vote. That year, 26.8 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties,” which voted either Democratic or Republican by 20 percentage points or more. By 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush split the popular vote, 45.3 percent of Americans lived in landslide counties. In 2008, the figure was 47.6 percent.
  • In 1980, Democrats and Republicans attended church at roughly the same rates. But Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard who explores “the God gap” in his book “American Grace,” finds attendance has since gone up markedly for Republicans and declined among Democrats — a sign, he said, that “people are changing their involvement with religion as a function of their politics.”
  • Political clustering is reflected in religious participation and even shopping choices. David Wasserman, of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, recently calculated that 89 percent of the Whole Foods stores in the United States were in counties carried by Barack Obama in 2008, while 62 percent of Cracker Barrel restaurants were in counties carried by John McCain.
  • “Political activism is much easier when you’re surrounded by like-minded others,” said Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Hearing the Other Side.” “The very kind of environment that might be more likely to increase people’s exposures to different viewpoints and convince them that compromise is necessary is not the kind of environment that encourages them to speak out politically or get involved.”
  • Marketers, though, offer another explanation. Americans, they say, may profess an interest in compromise, as an abstract goal or principle. But they don’t want to make the trade-offs necessary to cut a deal. Daniel Yankelovich, a market researcher, developed what he called the “mushiness index” to assess whether people truly understand the costs associated with the principles they express.
  • Today, people can buy all sorts of products — from Converse sneakers to Dell computers — designed exactly as they want them. If Americans don’t want to compromise in buying sneakers, he reasons, why would they make trade-offs in politics?
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Robert Aaron Long: What we know about the suspect in Atlanta spa shootings - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...t-aaron-long-suspected-shooter atlanta knowledge research education gun violence
shared by aprossi on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • What we know about Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in Atlanta spa shootings
  • State and federal investigators are scrambling to learn more about Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in a string of deadly shootings at three Atlanta-area Asian spas, and his alleged motive.
  • He is being held without bond in Cherokee County, where he faces four counts of murder and a charge of aggravated assault, according to the county sheriff's office. He also has been charged with more four counts of murder, Atlanta Police Department said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Tuesday's shootings took place at two spas in Atlanta and another in Acworth, about 10 miles west of Woodstock -- which left eight people, at least four of them Asian women, dead.
  • Authorities located Long about 150 miles south of Atlanta in Crisp County. State troopers took him into custody after using a special pursuit maneuver to spin his car out of control.
  • Sheriff Frank Reynolds of Cherokee County, where the Acworth shootings took place, told reporters Long "made indicators that he has some issues -- potentially sexual addiction -- and may have frequented some of these places in the past."Reynolds said those issues could be the motivation behind the shooting.
  • A law enforcement source said the suspect was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours on end watching pornography online.
  • Gun was purchased legally
  • Long purchased his gun legally at a local gun store, Big Woods Goods in Holly Springs, Georgia, an attorney for the company confirmed to CNN.
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LA County records more than 1 million coronavirus cases - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html county records million cases
shared by jmfinizio on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Los Angeles has become the first US county to report more than 1 million coronavirus cases
  • The department also announced its first confirmed case of the UK Covid-19 B.1.1.7 variant Saturday,
  • Public Health said it believed the more contagious UK variant was likely already spreading in the community and urged residents to "more diligently" follow safety measures.
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  • our healthcare system is already severely strained with more than 7,500 people currently hospitalized,
  • "This more contagious variant makes it easier for infections to spread at worksites, at stores, and in our homes.
  • "It feels like you're waking up to a nightmare, every day. We are trying to make a dent in this huge pandemic of people that are getting sick, hearing how many people are dying every day, it's, it's unfathomable," he said.
  • Ortiz said a lot of the deaths from Covid-19 were unnecessary but that the vaccination program provided hope.
  • Coronavirus has already infected and killed more people in the US than in any other country.
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Los Angeles becomes first county to hit 1 million Covid-19 cases - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...it-1-million-covid-19-n1254498 covid
shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Los Angeles on Saturday became the first county in the nation to record 1 million coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic.
  • “The presence of the U.K. variant in Los Angeles County is troubling, as our healthcare system is already severely strained with more than 7,500 people currently hospitalized,
  • On Saturday, Los Angeles reported 1,003,923 confirmed Covid-19 infections and 13,741 deaths.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The state of California is also reporting staggering numbers with more than 2.9 million confirmed cases, according to NBC News counts. Texas, with 2 million cases, and Florida, with 1.5 million, are the next two states with the most infections. New York, which was one of the country’s first and biggest hot spots, has recorded 1.2 million cases to date.
  • But its faster spread will lead to more cases overall, the study authors wrote, "exacerbating the burden on an already strained health care system, and resulting in more deaths."
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      sad to think that things can get worse than this
  • Since then, rates have increased by 1,000 percent and have disproportionately affected Latinos, who comprise roughly half of the total population.
  • It will take a number of months to reach the level of vaccination needed in the population to curb ongoing transmission of the virus."
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In Science, It's Never 'Just a Theory' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-its-never-just-a-theory.html new york times science theory education
shared by kushnerha on 09 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • In everyday conversation, we tend to use the word “theory” to mean a hunch, an idle speculation, or a crackpot notion.
  • That’s not what “theory” means to scientists.“In science, the word theory isn’t applied lightly,” Kenneth R. Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University, said. “It doesn’t mean a hunch or a guess. A theory is a system of explanations that ties together a whole bunch of facts. It not only explains those facts, but predicts what you ought to find from other observations and experiments.”
  • In 2002, the board of education in Cobb County, Ga., adopted the textbook but also required science teachers to put a warning sticker inside the cover of every copy.“Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things,” the sticker read, in part.In 2004, several Cobb County parents filed a lawsuit against the county board of education to have the stickers removed. They called Dr. Miller, who testified for about two hours, explaining, among other things, the strength of evidence for the theory of evolution.
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  • It’s helpful, he argues, to think about theories as being like maps.“To say something is a map is not to say it’s a hunch,” said Dr. Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the City University of New York and the University of Sydney. “It’s an attempt to represent some territory.”A theory, likewise, represents a territory of science. Instead of rivers, hills, and towns, the pieces of the territory are facts.“To call something a map is not to say anything about how good it is,” Dr. Godfrey-Smith added. “There are fantastically good maps where there’s not a shred of doubt about their accuracy. And there are maps that are speculative.”
  • To judge a map’s quality, we can see how well it guides us through its territory. In a similar way, scientists test out new theories against evidence. Just as many maps have proven to be unreliable, many theories have been cast aside.But other theories have become the foundation of modern science, such as the theory of evolution, the general theory of relativity, the theory of plate tectonics, the theory that the sun is at the center of the solar system, and the germ theory of disease.“To the best of our ability, we’ve tested them, and they’ve held up,” said Dr. Miller. “And that’s why we’ve held on to these things.”
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Wailing And Gnashing Of Teeth: Trumpers React To Draft 'Audit' Report Showing Biden Win... - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...audit-report-showing-biden-win audit arizona election confirmation bias
shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • the audit failed: Not only did it count Biden’s victory, but even its attempts to sow doubts about its own findings and the official results are fairly weak and rehearsed. 
  • But for Trump supporters desperate to keep the fiction going — particularly those who’ve staked their political campaigns on the Big Lie — the show needed to go on. 
  • Responding to the disappointing report, they ignored the bad news and acted as if it had affirmed their prior assumptions. And, therefore: Audits, forever and always. 
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  • “Now that the audit of Maricopa is wrapping up, we need to Audit Pima County – the 2nd largest county in AZ,” Mark Finchem, a member of the state legislature and the Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona secretary of state tweeted. He urged readers to sign his “petition” for a Pima County audit — one that would give his campaign their personal information.
  • A state representative from Florida used the report to call for audits in every state in the country. 
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Why Kids Sext - Hanna Rosin - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...380798 social media sexting sex online dating
shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Within an hour, the deputies realized just how common the sharing of nude pictures was at the school. “The boys kept telling us, ‘It’s nothing unusual. It happens all the time,’ ” Lowe recalls. Every time someone they were interviewing mentioned another kid who might have naked pictures on his or her phone, they had to call that kid in for an interview. After just a couple of days, the deputies had filled multiple evidence bins with phones, and they couldn’t see an end to it. Fears of a cabal got replaced by a more mundane concern: what to do with “hundreds of damned phones. I told the deputies, ‘We got to draw the line somewhere or we’re going to end up talking to every teenager in the damned county!’ ”
  • Nor did the problem stop at the county’s borders. Several boys, in an effort to convince Lowe that they hadn’t been doing anything rare or deviant, showed him that he could type the hashtag symbol (#) into Instagram followed by the name of pretty much any nearby county and then thots, and find a similar account.
  • In some he sensed low self-esteem—for example, the girl who’d sent her naked picture to a boy, unsolicited: “It just showed up! I guess she was hot after him?” A handful of senior girls became indignant during the course of the interview. “This is my life and my body and I can do whatever I want with it,” or, “I don’t see any problem with it. I’m proud of my body,” Lowe remembers them saying. A few, as far as he could tell, had taken pictures especially for the Instagram accounts and had actively tried to get them posted.
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  • What seemed to mortify them most was having to talk about what they’d done with a “police officer outside their age group.”
  • Most of the girls on Instagram fell into the same category as Jasmine. They had sent a picture to their boyfriend, or to someone they wanted to be their boyfriend, and then he had sent it on to others. For the most part, they were embarrassed but not devastated, Lowe said. They felt betrayed, but few seemed all that surprised that their photos had been passed around.
  • Lowe’s team explained to both the kids pictured on Instagram and the ones with photos on their phones the serious legal consequences of their actions. Possessing or sending a nude photo of a minor—even if it’s a photo of yourself—can be prosecuted as a felony under state child-porn laws. He explained that 10 years down the road they might be looking for a job or trying to join the military, or sitting with their families at church, and the pictures could wash back up; someone who had the pictures might even try to blackmail them.
  • yet the kids seemed strikingly blasé. “They’re just sitting there thinking, Wah, wah, wah,” Lowe said, turning his hands into flapping lips. “It’s not sinking in. Remember at that age, you think you’re invincible, and you’re going to do whatever the hell you want to do? We just couldn’t get them past that.”
  • while adults send naked pictures too, of course, the speed with which teens have incorporated the practice into their mating rituals has taken society by surprise.
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Wealthy, Male and American Students More Likely to BS | Time - 0 views

time.com/...bullshit-study-bs-wealthy-male psychology research social media education language bias brain science
shared by clairemann on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Students who are wealthier and male are more likely than others to claim that they know more than they actually do, says a new study.
  • The study, which reviewed surveys of 40,000 15-year-old students from across nine English-speaking countries, found that boys and people from wealthier families are more likely to be “bullshitters,” which it defines as “individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience at all.”
  • “You’re claiming expertise in things you have absolutely no knowledge of,” says Shure. “You couldn’t. These things don’t exist.”
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  • The countries where students were guilty of the most BS? The U.S. and Canada. Students in the two counties had scores that were .25 and .3 above average on the study’s “bullshit scale.” However, the two counties also had the narrowest gap between boys and girls, with a gap of .25 and .34 between the genders. In England and Ireland, the gap was much wider – .48 and .46 points.
  • Shure says that she is interested in determining whether a person’s ability to BS has a major impact on economic inequality between men and women, and how the ability plays out across socioeconomic lines.
  • “You can imagine that the people that score high on this bullshit index are good at certain things that might be rewarded,” says Shure. “It might be an interview to get into college. It could be an interview for a job, or an internship. It could be those skills end up helping exacerbate the gap that we observe between people from rich backgrounds and poor backgrounds, and even men and women.”
  • However, Shure says that it’s conceivable that “bullshitters” may have an advantage when it comes to getting ahead: “They clearly have very high opinions of themselves. And that could be associated with becoming leaders in the future.”
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CDC has confirmed 34 cases of novel coronavirus in the US - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • US officials have now confirmed 34 cases of novel coronavirus in the country, according to an announcement Friday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.These include 21 cases among repatriated individuals, as well as 13 US cases.
  • "We are keeping track of cases resulting from repatriation efforts separately because we don't believe those numbers accurately represent the picture of what is happening in the community in the United States at this time,"
  • The 21 repatriated include 18 former passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship that docked in Japan, plus three who had been previously evacuated from China.
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  • The 13th US case was confirmed overnight in Humboldt County, California. County officials offered few details but said a close contact with symptoms was also undergoing testing, and both are self-isolating at home.
  • "I think the folks on the ground did just the right thing, by -- out of an abundance of caution -- moving those 14 people into an isolation area where they pose no threat to themselves or anyone else, to provide room for a robust inter-agency discussion between not just CDC and state, but really the operational elements of HHS,"
  • "At the end of the day, the State Department had a decision to make, informed by our inter-agency partners, and we went ahead and made that decision," Walters said. "And the decision, I think, was the right one in bringing those people home."
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L.A. and California Economy Strong, But Might Take Small Hit from Coronavirus | Califor... - 0 views

www.apparelnews.net/...-strong-might-take-small-hit-c
shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • California’s gross domestic product is forecasted to grow 2.0 percent in 2020 and 1.6 percent in 2021, according to the forecast. Los Angeles County’s gross domestic product is forecasted to grow 1.8 percent in 2020 and slow down to 1.6 percent in 2021. The 10-county Southern California region is forecasted to grow at 1.8 percent over the next two years.
  • The economies of Los Angeles County and California have a lot to celebrate, according to speakers at the LAEDC’s forecast-release event, which was held at the Sheraton Grand Los Angeles at The Bloc retail center in downtown Los Angeles. California ranks as the number-one region for investment in new and emerging companies, according to figures that the LAEDC quoted from the Dow Jones VentureSource website.
  • The coronavirus will probably cause pain for the California and Los Angeles economies, mostly in the short term, said Stephen Cheung, executive vice president of the LAEDC and president of the World Trade Center Los Angeles.
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  • Panic over the coronavirus outbreak has caused the cancellation of at least two apparel trade shows and for major companies such as Apple, which has lowered its earnings forecast for the second quarter of its 2020 fiscal year.
  • Apparel businesses will have to move quickly to replenish inventories. They might choose to manufacture goods in Mexico or countries in the Central American Free Trade Agreement,said Mercedes Gonzalez, director of Global Purchasing Companies, who frequently travels to Latin America.
  • There are possibilities that Los Angeles and American manufacturers could receive a boost from companies looking for new factories. Daniel Antonio, founder of the Los Angeles–headquartered Dirtymilk label, had taken his manufacturing to Los Angeles after a few years of making it in China. “We’re not going back to China. We were victims of the trade war,” he said of Dirtymilk. “Then, next thing you know, you have this outbreak. It’s affecting a lot of people.”
  • “If they weren’t already here, they’re not coming here. They’re looking for other places overseas,” Antonio said. “Vietnam is a major factor right now. A lot of people are talking about Pakistan and Turkey.”
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With just one ICU bed available, Montgomery, Alabama, is sending sick patients to Birmi... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • The city of Montgomery, Alabama, which has only one intensive care unit bed left, is sending sick patients to Birmingham, more than an hour away, officials said.
  • "Right now, if you are from Montgomery, and you need an ICU bed, you are in trouble," Reed said at a press conference. "If you're from central Alabama, and you need an ICU bed, you may not be able to get one."
  • Alabama had 13,288 confirmed Covid-19 cases as of Thursday afternoon, according to Johns Hopkins University data. At least 528 people have died. That's 2,358 more cases than reported the same time last week. At that time, 450 deaths had been reported.
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  • "This is a serious matter and we have to maintain our practices even as many people are relaxing restrictions and the economy is opening back up," Reed said in a phone interview.
  • Social distancing and masks "really work," she said.
  • Most states across the country can ease some restrictions safely, but projects spikes in areas that have broadly reopened early, according to the model put together by a team at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.
  • "While our models show that rising temperatures and humidity levels are having an impact on reducing the spread of Covid-19, those hot, humid days of summer are not going to eliminate the threat of virus resurgence," said PolicyLab's Dr. Gregory Tasian, senior scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine.
  • Jefferson County, where Birmingham is located, had 1,453 confirmed cases as of Thursday, according to the state's health department data -- which is a jump of 35% from the 1,075 cases reported two weeks ago. The county has had 85 deaths attributed to Covid-19.
  • As of May 11, restaurants and bars were allowed to serve customers on site, gyms and athletic facilities, hair and nail salons and barber shops were allowed to open. Groups of any size are allowed, as long as the 6 feet distance guidance is followed.
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Housing costs, migration expected to crimp Southern California's economy - Daily News - 0 views

www.dailynews.com/...p-southern-californias-economy
shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Southern California’s economy remains strong, but it’s expected to lag slightly behind the state through 2021, according to a new report.
  • On the plus side, per capita income growth is expected to continue to outpace the nation and state, buoyed by strong employment in the construction, logistics, professional services and healthcare industries.
  • Long-term regional investments in transportation — most notably the Southern California Optimized Rail Expansion — will help boost growth in the area, the report said. The $10 billion capital improvement program, which runs from 2018 through 2028, includes track additions, station improvements and better signals and grade crossings to improve safety where trains cross surface streets.
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  • It’s projected to generate 1.3 million jobs and provide a $684 billion boost to Southern California’s economy.
  • Southern California is expected to add 129,800 jobs this year and 128,300 in 2021. This year’s biggest employment gain of 52,500 jobs will come in education and health services, the report said, with other sizable increases in leisure and hospitality (20,600), professional and business services (18,900) trade, transportation and utilities (13,200) and construction, natural resources and mining (12,100).
  • The report defines Southern California as a 10-county region that includes Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Imperial, Kern and San Luis Obispo counties.
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Photo of Officer Giving Boots to Barefoot Man Warms Hearts All Over Web - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-man-warms-hearts-online.html morality exemplar police poverty
shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • On a cold November night in Times Square, Officer Lawrence DePrimo was working a counterterrorism post when he encountered an older, barefooted homeless man. The officer disappeared for a moment, then returned with a new pair of boots, and knelt to help the man put them on.
  • The officer, normally assigned to the Sixth Precinct in the West Village, readily recalled the encounter. “It was freezing out and you could see the blisters on the man’s feet,” he said in an interview. “I had two pairs of socks and I was still cold.” They started talking; he found out the man’s shoe size: 12.
  • As the man walked slowly down Seventh Avenue on his heels, Officer DePrimo went into a Skechers shoe store at about 9:30 p.m. “We were just kind of shocked,” said Jose Cano, 28, a manager working at the store that night. “Most of us are New Yorkers and we just kind of pass by that kind of thing. Especially in this neighborhood.”
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  • The photo was taken by Jennifer Foster, a civilian communications director for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona. She said the moment resonated for personal reasons: She remembered as a young girl seeing her father, a 32-year veteran of the Phoenix police force, buy food for a homeless man. “He squatted down, just like this officer,” she said.
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Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis taste sense perception research
shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
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  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
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21 workers fired for taking part in 'Day Without Immigrants' protest - 0 views

www.khou.com/...409550478
shared by bennetttony on 23 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • bennetttony on 23 Feb 17
     
    LEXINGTON COUNTY, South Carolina - Twenty one people were fired from a South Carolina company after taking part in the Day Without Immigrants Protest. The movement closed restaurants and shops across the country to show the contributions immigrants have on the American workforce.
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Eric A. Posner Reviews Jim Manzi's "Uncontrolled" | The New Republic - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...uncontrolled-jim-manzi social science policy science methods conservativism bureaucratic
shared by Javier E on 02 May 12 - Cached
  • Most urgent questions of public policy turn on empirical imponderables, and so policymakers fall back on ideological predispositions or muddle through. Is there a better way?
  • The gold standard for empirical research is the randomized field trial (RFT).
  • The RFT works better than most other types of empirical investigation. Most of us use anecdotes or common sense empiricism to make inferences about the future, but psychological biases interfere with the reliability of these methods
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  • Serious empiricists frequently use regression analysis.
  • Regression analysis is inferior to RFT because of the difficulty of ruling out confounding factors (for example, that a gene jointly causes baldness and a preference for tight hats) and of establishing causation
  • RFT has its limitations as well. It is enormously expensive because you must (usually) pay a large number of people to participate in an experiment, though one can obtain a discount if one uses prisoners, especially those in a developing country. In addition, one cannot always generalize from RFTs.
  • academic research proceeds in fits and starts, using RFT when it can, but otherwise relying on regression analysis and similar tools, including qualitative case studies,
  • businesses also use RFT whenever they can. A business such as Wal-Mart, with thousands of stores, might try out some innovation like a new display in a random selection of stores, using the remaining stores as a control group
  • Manzi argues that the RFT—or more precisely, the overall approach to empirical investigation that the RFT exemplifies—provides a way of thinking about public policy. Thi
  • the universe is shaky even where, as in the case of physics, “hard science” plays the dominant role. The scientific method cannot establish truths; it can only falsify hypotheses. The hypotheses come from our daily experience, so even when science prunes away intuitions that fail the experimental method, we can never be sure that the theories that remain standing reflect the truth or just haven’t been subject to the right experiment. And even within its domain, the experimental method is not foolproof. When an experiment contradicts received wisdom, it is an open question whether the wisdom is wrong or the experiment was improperly performed.
  • The book is less interested in the RFT than in the limits of empirical knowledge. Given these limits, what attitude should we take toward government?
  • Much of scientific knowledge turns out to depend on norms of scientific behavior, good faith, convention, and other phenomena that in other contexts tend to provide an unreliable basis for knowledge.
  • Under this view of the world, one might be attracted to the cautious conservatism associated with Edmund Burke, the view that we should seek knowledge in traditional norms and customs, which have stood the test of time and presumably some sort of Darwinian competition—a human being is foolish, the species is wise. There are hints of this worldview in Manzi’s book, though he does not explicitly endorse it. He argues, for example, that we should approach social problems with a bias for the status quo; those who seek to change it carry the burden of persuasion. Once a problem is identified, we should try out our ideas on a small scale before implementing them across society
  • Pursuing the theme of federalism, Manzi argues that the federal government should institutionalize policy waivers, so states can opt out from national programs and pursue their own initiatives. A state should be allowed to opt out of federal penalties for drug crimes, for example.
  • It is one thing to say, as he does, that federalism is useful because we can learn as states experiment with different policies. But Manzi takes away much of the force of this observation when he observes, as he must, that the scale of many of our most urgent problems—security, the economy—is at the national level, so policymaking in response to these problems cannot be left to the states. He also worries about social cohesion, which must be maintained at a national level even while states busily experiment. Presumably, this implies national policy of some sort
  • Manzi’s commitment to federalism and his technocratic approach to policy, which relies so heavily on RFT, sit uneasily together. The RFT is a form of planning: the experimenter must design the RFT and then execute it by recruiting subjects, paying them, and measuring and controlling their behavior. By contrast, experimentation by states is not controlled: the critical element of the RFT—randomization—is absent.
  • The right way to go would be for the national government to conduct experiments by implementing policies in different states (or counties or other local units) by randomizing—that is, by ordering some states to be “treatment” states and other states to be “control” states,
  • Manzi’s reasoning reflects the top-down approach to social policy that he is otherwise skeptical of—although, to be sure, he is willing to subject his proposals to RFTs.
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Deluded Individualism - NYTimes.com - 2 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...deluded-individualism individualism self-reliance autonomy Freud Spinoza US culture
shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 12 - Cached
  • We tend to see ourselves as self-determining, self-conscious agents in all that we decide and do, and we cling to that image. But why? Why do we resist the truth? Why do we wish — strain, strive, against the grain of reality — to be autonomous individuals, and see ourselves as such?
  • why do we presume individual agency in the first place? Why do we insist on it stubbornly, irrationally, often recklessly?
  • though Republicans call for deep cuts to the safety net, their districts rely more on government support than their Democratic counterparts.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The Times’s reporters spoke with residents who supported the Tea Party and its proposed cuts to federal spending, even while they admitted they could not get by without government support.
  • the fate of the middle class counties and urban ghettos is entwined. When the poor are left to rot in their misery, the misery does not stay contained. It harms us all. The crime radiates, the misery offends, it debases the whole. Individuals, much less communities, cannot be insulated from it.
  • Thanks to a decades-long safety net, we have forgotten the trials of living without it. This is why, the historian Tony Judt argued, it’s easy for some to speak fondly of a world without government: we can’t fully imagine or recall what it’s like. We can’t really appreciate the horrors Upton Sinclair witnessed in the Chicago slaughterhouses before regulation, or the burden of living without Social Security and Medicare to look forward to. Thus, we can entertain nostalgia for a time when everyone pulled his own weight, bore his own risk, and was the master of his destiny. That time was a myth
  • To be human, according to Spinoza, is to be party to a confounding existential illusion — that human individuals are independent agents — which exacts a heavy emotional and political toll on us. It is the source of anxiety, envy, anger — all the passions that torment our psyche — and the violence that ensues.
  • There is no such thing as a discrete individual, Spinoza points out. This is a fiction. The boundaries of ‘me’ are fluid and blurred. We are all profoundly linked in countless ways we can hardly perceive. My decisions, choices, actions are inspired and motivated by others to no small extent.
  • we’re all in this together. We are not the sole authors of our destiny, each of us; our destinies are entangled — messily, unpredictably. Our cultural demands of individualism are too extreme. They are constitutionally irrational, Spinoza and Freud tell us, and their potential consequences are disastrous. Thanks to our safety net, we live in a society that affirms the dependence and interdependence of all. To that extent, it affirms a basic truth of our nature. We forsake it at our own peril.
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