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FBI arrests spotlight lessons learned after Charlottesville (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • On Thursday, the FBI arrested three men, Patrik J. Mathews, 27, Brian M. Lemley Jr., 33, and William G. Bilbrough IV, 19, with firearms charges, and they had plans, an official said, to attend a Virginia pro-gun rally. This followed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's declaration of a temporary state of emergency after authorities learned that extremists hoped to use the anti-gun control rally planned next Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- to incite a violent clash.
  • These arrests add to mounting evidence that a decades-old and violent white-power movement is alive and well, perhaps even gaining strength. White power is a social movement that has united neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, and militiamen around a shared fear of racial annihilation and cultural change. Since 1983, when movement leaders declared war on the federal government, members of such groups have worked together to bring about a race war.
  • JUST WATCHEDOn GPS: What motivates white power activists?ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH position: absol
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  • Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.
  • The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.
  • One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.
  • This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.
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Can Artificial Intelligence Be Creative? | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

  • Machines can write compelling ad copy and solve complex “real life” problems. Should the creative class be worried?
  • Rich breaks down some “abstract” problems into their fundamental parts and shows how, with comprehensive enough data and well-structured enough logical programming, AI could be suited to tackle creative problems. In one case, she offers a “real world” example about a manufacturing company’s new line of products and their plans, goals, and expectations for marketing the new line to a specific city. Weekly Newsletter Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday. Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.
  • almost all problems rely (or ought to rely) on an understanding of the nature of both knowledge and reasoning. Humanists are trying to solve many of these same problems. Thus there is room for a good deal of interaction between artificial intelligence and many disciplines within the humanities.
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  • There is much to be said, however, for art’s ability to evoke emotion based on common experience, sincerity, talent, and unique skill. Rich proves that AI can be used to answer complicated questions. But what we think of as creative work in the humanities is much more often about asking questions than it is about answering them.
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Live Updates: Economic Fallout From Coronavirus Grows - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Reports from manufacturing, banking and other sectors showed the worsening impact of the epidemic, which has brought much of China’s economy to a standstill.
  • Right NowJapan plans to release about 500 cruise ships passengers on Wednesday.
  • Economic fallout from the new coronavirus epidemic continued to spread on Tuesday, with new evidence emerging in manufacturing, financial markets, commodities, banking and other sectors.
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  • U.S. stocks declined on Tuesday, a day after Apple warned that it would miss its sales forecasts due to disruption in China, as concerns about the impact of the outbreak weighed on the outlook for the global economy.
  • Half of China’s population is facing new travel restrictions.Image
  • At least 150 million people in China — over 10 percent of the country’s population — are living under government restrictions on how often they can leave their homes, The New York Times found in examining dozens of local government announcements and reports from state-run news outlets.
  • Japan says 500 people will be released from cruise ship after more cases confirmed.
  • Australia plans to repatriate about 200 of its citizens aboard the ship on Wednesday, and other countries have similar plans, but Japanese officials did not say whether any of those people were among the 500 who would be allowed to disembark.
  • Britain prepares to evacuate citizens from cruise ship.
  • The new virus is deadlier than the one that causes the flu, Chinese figures suggest.Image
  • The director of a hospital in Wuhan has died from the virus.
  • Stigma surrounding virus impacts communities in Europe.
  • Domestic workers from the Philippines will be permitted to return to Hong Kong.Image
  • South Korea’s leader warns of a dire impact on economy.
  • Cruise ship passengers blocked from leaving Cambodia.
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Why Do We Teach Girls That It's Cute to Be Scared? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Why Do We Teach Girls That It’s Cute to Be Scared?
  • Apparently, fear is expected of women.
  • parents cautioned their daughters about the dangers of the fire pole significantly more than they did their sons and were much more likely to assist them
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  • But both moms and dads directed their sons to face their fears, with instruction on how to complete the task on their own.
  • Misadventures meant that I should try again. With each triumph over fear and physical adversity, I gained confidence.
  • She said that her own mother had been very fearful, gasping at anything remotely rough-and-tumble. “I had been so discouraged from having adventures, and I wanted you to have a more exciting childhood,”
  • arents are “four times more likely to tell girls than boys to be more careful”
  • “Girls may be less likely than boys to try challenging physical activities, which are important for developing new skills.” This study points to an uncomfortable truth: We think our daughters are more fragile, both physically and emotionally, than our sons. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Nobody is saying that injuries are good, or that girls should be reckless. But risk taking is important
  • It follows that by cautioning girls away from these experiences, we are not protecting them. We are failing to prepare them for life.
  • When a girl learns that the chance of skinning her knee is an acceptable reason not to attempt the fire pole, she learns to avoid activities outside her comfort zone.
  • Fear becomes a go-to feminine trait, something girls are expected to feel and express at will.
  • By the time a girl reaches her tweens no one bats an eye when she screams at the sight of an insect.
  • When girls become women, this fear manifests as deference and timid decision making
  • We must chuck the insidious language of fear (Be careful! That’s too scary!) and instead use the same terms we offer boys, of bravery and resilience. We need to embolden girls to master skills that at first appear difficult, even dangerous. And it’s not cute when a 10-year-old girl screeches, “I’m too scared.”
  • I was often scared. Of course I was. So were the men.
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Why Facebook's News Experiment Matters to Readers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Facebook’s new plan to host news publications’ stories directly is not only about page views, advertising revenue or the number of seconds it takes for an article to load. It is about who owns the relationship with readers.
  • It’s why Google, a search engine, started a social network and why Facebook, a social network, started a search engine. It’s why Amazon, a shopping site, made a phone and why Apple, a phone maker, got into shopping.
  • Facebook’s experiment, called instant articles, is small to start — just a few articles from nine media companies, including The New York Times. But it signals a major shift in the relationship between publications and their readers. If you want to read the news, Facebook is saying, come to Facebook, not to NBC News or The Atlantic or The Times — and when you come, don’t leave. (For now, these articles can be viewed on an iPhone running the Facebook app.)
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  • The front page of a newspaper and the cover of a magazine lost their dominance long ago.
  • But news reports, like albums before them, have not been created that way. One of the services that editors bring to readers has been to use their news judgment, considering a huge range of factors, when they decide how articles fit together and where they show up. The news judgment of The New York Times is distinct from that of The New York Post, and for generations readers appreciated that distinction.
  • “In digital, every story becomes unbundled from each other, so if you’re not thinking of each story as living on its own, it’s tying yourself back to an analog era,” Mr. Kim said.
  • Facebook executives have insisted that they intend to exert no editorial control because they leave the makeup of the news feed to the algorithm. But an algorithm is not autonomous. It is written by humans and tweaked all the time. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • That raises some journalistic questions. The news feed algorithm works, in part, by showing people more of what they have liked in the past. Some studies have suggested that means they might not see as wide a variety of news or points of view, though others, including one by Facebook researchers, have found they still do.
  • Tech companies, Facebook included, are notoriously fickle with their algorithms. Publications became so dependent on Facebook in the first place because of a change in its algorithm that sent more traffic their way. Later, another change demoted articles from sites that Facebook deemed to run click-bait headlines. Then last month, Facebook decided to prioritize some posts from friends over those from publications.
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30 Famous Logos That Have A Hidden Message | Diply - 3 views

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    Whether you're cruising down the aisles of the grocery store, or speeding down the freeway, you're guaranteed to come across a few famous logos. Take one glance at any one of these logos and you instantly recognize the brand, but did you know there's sometimes a hidden message buried in them? It's surprising, but true.
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'Mona Lisa': Hidden portraits 'found underneath' - CNN.com - 0 views

  • smile
  • But does it belong to an entirely different woman?
  • The hidden picture shows a woman looking into the distance, with no trace of the characteristic smile.
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  • My scientific imagery technique (L.A.M.) takes us into the heart of the paint-layers of the world's most famous picture and reveals secrets that have remained hidden for 500 years,"
  • he scientist used a multispectral camera to project intense lights on to the painting while measuring the reflections.
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Coronavirus Live Updates: China Is Tracking Travelers From Hubei - The New York Times - 0 views

  • To combat the spread of the coronavirus, Chinese officials are using a combination of technology and policing to track movements of citizens who may have visited Hubei Province.
  • Mobile phone owners in China get their service from one of three state-run telecommunications firms, which this week introduced a feature for subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited. That has created a new way for the authorities to see where citizens have traveled.At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu on Tuesday, officials in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages and then show their location information to the authorities before being permitted to leave the station. Those who had passed through Hubei were unlikely to be allowed entry.
  • Top officials in Beijing on Thursday expanded their mass roundup of sick or possibly infected people beyond Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, to include other cities in Hubei Province that have been hit hard by the crisis, according to the state-run CCTV broadcaster.
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  • Chinese officials reported Friday that a surge in new infections was continuing, though not as markedly as the day before, when the number of people confirmed to have the virus in Hubei Province skyrocketed by 14,840 cases.
  • Japan has confirmed its first death from the virus.
  • For a moment on Thursday, it seemed as if there might be some good news from the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship being held in the port of Yokohama in Japan, when the authorities said they would release some passengers to shore to finish their quarantine.Instead, Japanese health officials announced the first death from the virus in the country, of a woman in her 80s. It was third death from the virus outside mainland China. The woman had no record of travel there.
  • The Centers for Disease Control said Thursday that a person under quarantine at a military base in San Antonio had tested positive for the virus, bringing the number of confirmed coronavirus patients in the United States to 15.
  • For the first time in a decade, global oil demand is expected to fall.
  • The arts world, too, is feeling the squeeze.Image
  • Movie releases have been canceled in China and symphony tours suspended. A major art fair in Hong Kong was called off. And spring art auctions half a world away in New York have been postponed because well-heeled Chinese buyers may find it difficult to travel to them.
  • The U.S. reported its 15th case after a person under quarantine tested positive.
  • The travel industry in Asia has been upended.Image
  • China ousted a provincial leader at the center of the outbreak.
  • China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday summarily fired two top Communist Party officials from Hubei Province, exacting political punishment for the regional government’s handling of the crisis.
  • A second citizen-journalist in Wuhan has disappeared.
  • A video blogger in the city of Wuhan who had been documenting conditions at overcrowded hospitals at the heart of the outbreak has disappeared, raising concerns among his supporters that he may have been detained by the authorities.The blogger, Fang Bin, is the second citizen journalist in the city to have gone missing in a week after criticizing the government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic.Mr. Fang began posting videos from hospitals in Wuhan on YouTube last month, including one that showed a pile of body bags in a minibus. In early February, Mr. Fang said he had been briefly detained and questioned. A few days later, he filmed an exchange he had with strangers who showed up at his apartment claiming to bring him food.Mr. Fang’s last video, posted on Sunday, was a message written on a piece of paper: “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”Last week, Chen Qiushi, a citizen-journalist and lawyer in Wuhan who recorded the plight of patients and the shortage of hospital supplies, vanished, according to his friends.
  • South Korea quarantined hundreds of soldiers who visited China.
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How Social Isolation Is Killing Us - The New York Times - 0 views

  • About one-third of Americans older than 65 now live alone, and half of those over 85 do. People in poorer health — especially those with mood disorders like anxiety and depression — are more likely to feel lonely. Those without a college education are the least likely to have someone they can talk to about important personal matters.
  • Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking.
  • The loneliness of older adults has different roots — often resulting from family members moving away and close friends passing away. As one senior put it, “Your world dies before you do.”
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  • “In America, you almost need an excuse for knocking on a neighbor’s door,” Dr. Tang told me. “We want to break down those barriers.”
  • “You don’t need a playmate every day,” Dr. Tang said. “But knowing you’re valued and a contributing member of society is incredibly reaffirming.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • A great paradox of our hyper-connected digital age is that we seem to be drifting apart. Increasingly, however, research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being. It’s up to all of us — doctors, patients, neighborhoods and communities — to maintain bonds where they’re fading, and create ones where they haven’t existed.
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    We are always finding reasons to do something good for others. However, these barriers are just invented. We don't need reason to be kind and friendly. The digital age gives us access to more people, but it also limits attention and effort to form a friendship. Our brain is limited so there is attention blindness showing that we cannot handle too much information. What we should do is focus our attention on people in our community and actually make effort to form relationships and connections. Usually, people that's most realistic and close to us are not online. --Sissi (12/23/2016)
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Dogs, Cats and Leadership - The New York Times - 1 views

  • the performance of presidents, especially on foreign policy, is shaped by how leaders attach to problems. Some leaders are like dogs: They want to bound right in and make things happen. Some are more like cats: They want to detach and maybe look for a pressure point here or there.
  • we should be asking them a different set of questions:
  • How much do you think a president can change the flow of world events? President Obama, for example, has a limited or, if you want to put it that way, realistic view of the extent of American influence. He subscribes to a series of propositions that frequently push him toward nonintervention: The world “is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place and full of hardship and tragedy,” he told Goldberg. You can’t fix everything. Sometimes you can only shine a spotlight.
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  • Furthermore, Obama argues, because of our history, American military efforts are looked at with suspicion. Allies are unreliable. Ukraine is always going to be in Russia’s sphere of influence, so its efforts there will always trump ours. The Middle East is a morass and no longer that important to U.S. interests.
  • Do you think out loud in tandem with a community, or do you process internally? Throughout the Goldberg article, Obama is seen thinking deeply and subtly, but apart from the group around him. In catlike fashion, he is a man who knows his own mind and trusts his own judgment. His decision not to bomb Syria after it crossed the chemical weapons red line was made almost entirely alone.
  • More generally, Obama expresses disdain with the foreign policy community. He is critical of most of his fellow world leaders — impatient with most European ones, fed up with most Middle Eastern ones.
  • When seeking a description of a situation, does your mind leap for the clarifying single truth or do you step back to see the complex web of factors? Ronald Reagan typified the single clarifying truth habit of mind, both when he was describing an enemy (Evil Empire) and when he was calling for change (tear down this wal
  • , Obama leans to the other side of the spectrum. He is continually stepping back, starting with analyses of human nature, how people behave when social order breaks down, the roots and nature of tribalism.
  • Do you see international affairs as a passionate struggle or a conversation and negotiation? Continue reading the main story 343 Comments Obama shows a continual distrust of passion. He doesn’t see much value in macho bluffing or chest-thumping, or in lofty Churchillian rhetoric, or in bombings done in the name of “credibility.”
  • He may be critical, but he is not a hater. He doesn’t even let anger interfere with his appraisal of Vladimir Putin
  • it’s striking how many Americans have responded by going for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who are bad versions of the bounding in/we-can-change-everything doggy type.
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How 'Empowerment' Became Something for Women to Buy - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The mix of things presumed to transmit and increase female power is without limit yet still depressingly limiting.“Empowerment” wasn’t always so trivialized, or so corporate, or even so clamorously attached to women.
  • Four decades ago, the word had much more in common with Latin American liberation theology than it did with “Lean In.” In 1968, the Brazilian academic Paulo Freire coined the word “conscientization,” empowerment’s precursor, as the process by which an oppressed person perceives the structural conditions of his oppression and is subsequently able to take action against his oppressors.
  • Eight years later, the educator Barbara Bryant Solomon, writing about American black communities, gave this notion a new name, “empowerment.” It was meant as an ethos for social workers in marginalized communities, to discourage paternalism and encourage their clients to solve problems in their own ways. Then in 1981, Julian Rappaport, a psychologist, broadened the concept into a political theory of power that viewed personal competency as fundamentally limitless; it placed faith in the individual and laid at her feet a corresponding amount of responsibility too.
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  • Sneakily, empowerment had turned into a theory that applied to the needy while describing a process more realistically applicable to the rich. The word was built on a misaligned foundation; no amount of awareness can change the fact that it’s the already-powerful who tend to experience empowerment at any meaningful rate. Today “empowerment” invokes power while signifying the lack of it. It functions like an explorer staking a claim on new territory with a white flag.
  • highly marketable “women’s empowerment,” neither practice nor praxis, nor really theory, but a glossy, dizzying product instead. Women’s empowerment borrows the virtuous window-dressing of the social worker’s doctrine and kicks its substance to the side. It’s about pleasure, not power; it’s individualistic and subjective, tailored to insecurity and desire.
  • The new empowerment doesn’t increase potential so much as it assures you that your potential is just fine. Even when the thing being described as “empowering” is personal and mildly defiant (not shaving, not breast-feeding, not listening to men, et cetera), what’s being mar­keted is a certain identity.
  • When consumer purchases aren’t made out to be a path to female empowerment, a branded corporate experience often is. There’s TEDWomen (“about the power of women”), the Forbes Women’s Summit (“#RedefinePower”) and Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Conference (tickets are $10,000).
  • This consumption-and-conference empowerment dilutes the word to pitch-speak, and the concept to something that imitates rather than alters the structures of the world. This version of empowerment can be actively disempowering: It’s a series of objects and experiences you can purchase while the conditions determining who can access and accumulate power stay the same. The ready partici­pation of well-off women in this strat­egy also points to a deep truth about the word “empowerment”: that it has never been defined by the people who actually need it. People who talk empowerment are, by definition, already there.
  • I have never said “empowerment” sincerely or heard it from a single one of my friends. The formulation has been diluted to something representational and bloodless — an architectural rendering of a building that will never be built.But despite its nonexistence in honest conversation, “empowerment” goes on thriving. It’s uniquely marketable, like the female body, which is where women’s empowerment is forced to live.
  • Like Sandberg, Kardashian is the apotheosis of a particular brand of largely contentless feminism, a celebratory form divorced from material politics, which makes it palatable — maybe irresistible — to the business world. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The mistake would be to locate further empowerment in choosing between the two. Corporate empowerment — as well as the lightweight, self-exculpatory feminism it rides on — feeds rav­enously on the distracting performance of identity, that buffet of false opposition.
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Rachel Dolezal's Unintended Gift to America - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It is most unfortunate that Ms. Dolezal did not begin her television interviews on Tuesday by acknowledging that she should not have claimed to be black. She might have been forgiven if she had stated clearly that, while she may identify herself as black, by American society’s standards, her racial designation is white.
  • Ms. Dolezal’s view of herself — however confused, or incongruent with society’s — reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fiction, a social construct based in culture and not biology. It must be “made” from what people believe and do. Race is performative. It is the memories that bind us, the stories passed down to us, the experiences that we share, the social forces that surround us.
  • Identities are never entirely our own, but does that mean that we should lose all control in determining who we are? Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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  • Even W. E. B. Du Bois had trouble formulating a theoretically accurate account of racial identity, so he put it simply: A black man is “a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.” But his statement still leaves us with a puzzle: What would a black man be without Jim Crow to define him?
  • The historical evidence is overwhelming, then, that the color line has always been far more porous and fragile than one might assume. In some places, it was so brittle that it could buckle and break.
  • To say that race is socially constructed gives it an air of make-believe. Race is quite real to those who live with it. Ask the families of the black men and women who have lost their lives during tragic encounters with the police. The choices about “who” they were, were not their own.
  • There is no essentialized, fixed, “true identity” waiting just below the surface. Identities are contingent, elusive and, as the cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued, “always in process.
  • at the very least, perhaps we can use Ms. Dolezal’s story, puzzling as it is, as an opportunity to have a candid, lively, long-delayed, public conversation about the knotty meanings of race and racial identity, and how it has confounded our nation’s best aspirations. Perhaps we may yet move beyond the imprisoning boxes we have made.
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Trump Is Expected to Sign Orders That Could Expand Access to Fossil Fuels - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • After moving last month against Barack Obama’s efforts to limit fossil fuel exploration and combat climate change, President Trump will complete his effort to overturn environmental policy this week, signing two executive orders to expand offshore drilling and roll back conservation on public lands.
  • The president is then expected to follow up on Friday with another executive order aimed at opening up protected waters in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans to offshore drilling.
  • Friday’s order is also expected to call for the lifting of a permanent ban on drilling in an area including many of those same waters — a measure Mr. Obama issued in December 2016 in a last-ditch effort to protect his environmental legacy from his drilling-enthusiast successor.
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  • he orders are not likely to lead either to significant new energy development or to job creation in the near future.
  • And the process of undoing Obama-era regulations will take more than a flick of Mr. Trump’s pen.
  • Environmental groups warn that just opening the door to future drilling in pristine federal lands and waters could lead to more disasters like the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which sent millions of barrels of oil to the shorelines of coastal states, killing wildlife and destroying fragile ecosystems. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • “Offshore drilling in the Atlantic and the Arctic is still dirty and dangerous.”
  • In the century since Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act into law, presidents have used the law to put hundreds of millions of acres of land and waters off limits to development, and no president has undone a predecessor’s designations.
  • But even his allies noted that such a move would be unlikely to lead to rigs in the water for several years, and that it could easily be reversed by Mr. Trump’s successor.
  • “It will involve a lot of effort by agencies. It will involve lawsuits. And hopefully it will involve Congress, so they can cement these” changes in place.
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    We are not listening to the professionals about climate change. People will most likely look back at this history and blame us for the future of the environment if we don't work now to fix it. If these plans eventually go through, the climate will be much harder to fix, and this is part of the problem we will have to deal with.
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E.P.A. Dismisses Members of Major Scientific Review Board - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Members of the board say they have reviewed the E.P.A.’s scientific research on the public health impact of leaking underground fuel tanks, the toxicity of the chemicals used to clean up oil spills, and the effects of the spread of bark beetles caused by a warming climate. Advertisement Continue reading the main story A larger, corresponding panel, the 47-member Science Advisory Board, advises the agency on what areas it should conduct research in and evaluates the scientific integrity of some of its regulations.
  • Both boards, which until now have been composed almost entirely of academic research scientists, have long been targets of political attacks. Congressional Republicans and industry groups have sought to either change their composition or weaken their influence on the environmental regulatory process.
  • “In recent years, S.A.B. experts have become nothing more than rubber stamps who approve all of the E.P.A.’s regulations,” Mr. Smith said at a House hearing in February. “The E.P.A. routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government. The conflict of interest here is clear.”
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The Increasing Significance of the Decline of Men - The New York Times - 0 views

  • At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate.
  • But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates.
  • From 1979 to 2007, seven percent of men and 16 percent of women with middle-skill jobs lost their positions, according to the Dallas Fed study. Four percent of these men moved to low-skill work, and 3 percent moved to high-skill jobs. Almost all the women, 15 percent, moved into high-skill jobs, with only 1 percent moving to low-skill work.
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  • For boys and girls raised in two-parent households, there were only modest differences between the sexes in terms of success at school, and boys tended to earn more than their sisters in early adulthood.
  • At the same time, the divorce rate for college graduates has declined from 34.8 percent among those born between 1950 and 1955 to 29.9 percent among those born between 1957 and 1964. In contrast, the divorce rate for those without college degrees increased over the same period from 44.3 percent to 50.6 percent.
  • First, there are irreversible changes in the workplace, particularly the rise of jobs requiring social skills (even STEM jobs) that will continue to make it hard for men who lack those skills.
  • Females consistently score higher on tests of emotional and social intelligence. Sex differences in sociability and social perceptiveness have been shown to have biological origins, with differences appearing in infancy and higher levels of fetal testosterone associated with lower scores on tests of social intelligence.
  • This vulnerability, in turn, makes boys more susceptible toattention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and conduct disorders as well as the epigenetic mechanisms that can account for the recent widespread increase of these disorders in U.S. culture.
  • Schore argues that a major factor in rising dysfunction among boys and men in this country is the failure of the United States to provide longer periods of paid parental leave, with the result that many infants are placed in day care when they are six weeks old.
  • Men are really going to have to change their act or have big problems. I think of big guys from the cave days, guys who were good at lifting stuff and hunting and the things we got genetically selected out for. During the industrial revolution that wasn’t so bad, but it’s not going to be there anymore.
  • Second, male children suffer more from restricted or nonexistent parental leave policies and contemporary child care arrangements, as well as from growing up in single-parent households. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • It has been a longstanding objective of right-wing regimes to push women back into traditional gender roles. Is that what’s going on here? Or could it be something less pernicious and more important?
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    I think this research is very interesting. It takes a different perspective when discussing gender issues. It notices that there are actually a decline of men in the society. Although there are still wage inequality and other gender problems that women are usually in disadvantages, men are having more and more disadvantages now as the the society shift from physical work to mental work. As the society evolved, the social structure also evolves. Gender equality means we should put equal attention to all genders (there are more than two). --Sissi (3/16/2017)
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After Britain Attack, Trump Unleashes a Twitter Storm - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people,” he wrote on Twitter. “If we don’t get smart it will only get worse.”
  • “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now?” he wrote on Sunday morning. “That’s because they used knives and a truck!” Advertisement Continue reading the main story On Saturday night, he wrote: “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”
  • “You have to be kidding me?!: Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote at the time.Mr. Trump’s post left the impression that Mr. Khan was minimizing the importance of terrorist attacks. But in fact, he was saying that terrorism was a reality that a big city needed to be prepared to prevent and respond to vigorously.
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  • Asked later during a television interview about the president’s son, Mr. Khan dismissed the post. “I’m not going to respond to a tweet from Donald Trump Jr.,” he said on CNN. “I’ve been doing far more important things over the last 24 hours.”
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    using Twitter is Trump's way of communicating; interesting for a president. it seems it portrays him as a less serious president, unfortunately. social media can be useful, but Trump uses it in ways that are not always appropriate. sometimes it is very difficult to correctly interpret the tone of a statement over the internet when there is no real human voice behind it.
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An Algorithm Isn't Always the Answer - The New York Times - 1 views

  • in just about every aspect of my life I seek order and safety.
  • Picture me on Tinder circa 2014.
  • Here are my search criteria: I’m looking for men in my area (no farther than three miles away, because traveling is such a hassle and I take too many cabs as it is) who are anywhere from two years younger than me up to 10 years older (going on the assumption that women mature more quickly than men). And for goodness’ sake, my friends would tell me, find a man who isn’t a writer — they’re way too emotionally unstable. Certainly if I could check most of those items off the checklist, I’d find love or some good enough approximation of it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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  • How did it go? I was absolutely miserable dating appropriate-age marketing associates who lived near me. I always wanted to be at home reading instead
  • Then one night I held a reading with some authors I admire at a bookstore, and I threw an after-party at my favorite dive bar. In walked a friend of a friend who I sort of knew from the internet but who I’d never met in real life. He is six years younger than I am (way too young for me) and he lived in Harlem (that’s a $40 cab fare from my home in Brooklyn) and he’s a writer/comedian (warning flags coming at me from every direction). But we talked and he charmed me. He was online dating, too, but I never would’ve found him on an app. He wasn’t on my metaphorical vision board, but he fit into my real life in ways I never could’ve imagined. He’s my husband now. (He likes David Foster Wallace.)
  • The internet is supposed to make it easier for us to find people and places and perfect gifts, and more profitable for companies that offer those services. And yet here I am, with my too-old dog and my too-young husband and my ever-growing book collection, happier than I could have predicted.
  • It’s risky not to have data, to be without numbers you can plug in when you’re looking for something or someone to love. We think we know exactly what we want. But I hope that our guts remain true to our hearts, and in this world measured by clicks and stars and highest customer reviews, we remember that some rules are made to be broken in the most delightful of ways.
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Taking On Adam Smith (and Karl Marx) - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “This sort of vaccinated me for life against lazy, anticapitalist rhetoric, because when you see these empty shops, you see these people queuing for nothing in the street,” he said, “it became clear to me that we need private property and market institutions, not just for economic efficiency but for personal freedom.”
  • But his disenchantment with communism doesn’t mean that Mr. Piketty has turned his back on the intellectual heritage of Karl Marx, who sought to explain the “iron laws” of capitalism. Like Marx, he is fiercely critical of the economic and social inequalities that untrammeled capitalism produces — and, he concludes, will continue to worsen. “I belong to a generation that never had any temptation with the Communist Party; I was too young for that,” Mr. Piketty said, in
  • In his new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (Harvard University Press), Mr. Piketty, 42, has written a blockbuster, at least in the world of economics. His book punctures earlier assumptions about the benevolence of advanced capitalism and forecasts sharply increasing inequality of wealth in industrialized countries, with deep and deleterious impact on democratic values of justice and fairness.
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  • Branko Milanovic, a former economist at the World Bank, called it “one of the watershed books in economic thinking.
  • “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” with its title echoing Marx’s “Das Kapital,” is meant to be a return to the kind of economic history, of political economy, written by predecessors like Marx and Adam Smith. It is nothing less than a broad effort to understand Western societies and the economic rules that underpin them.
  • he said, are his generation’s “founding experiences”: the collapse of Communism, the economic degradation of Eastern Europe and the first Gulf War, in 1991.
  • Those events motivated him to try to understand a world where economic ideas had such bad consequences. As for the Gulf War, it showed him that “governments can do a lot in terms of redistribution of wealth when they want.” The rapid intervention to fo
  • The reason that postwar economies looked different — that inequality fell — was historical catastrophe. World War I, the Depression and World War II destroyed huge accumulations of private capital, especially in Europe. What the French call “les
  • In 2012 the top 1 percent of American households collected 22.5 percent of the nation’s income, the highest total since 1928. The richest 10 percent of Americans now take a larger slice of the pie than in 1913, at the close of the Gilded Age, owning more than 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. And half of that is owned by the top 1 percent. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Piketty, father of three daughters — 11, 13 and 16 — is no revolutionary. He is a member of no political party, and says he never served as an economic adviser to any politician. He calls himself a pragmatist, who simply follows the data.
  • Net wealth is a better indicator of ability to pay than income alone, he said. “All I’m proposing is to reduce the property tax on half or three-quarters of the population who have very little wealth,” he said. Write A Comment Published a year ago in French, the book is not without critics, especially of Mr. Piketty’s policy prescriptions, which have been called politically naïve. Others point out that some of the increase in capital is because of aging populations and postwar pension plans, which are not necessarily inherited.More criticism is sure to come, and Mr. Piketty says he welcomes it. “I’m certainly looking forward to the debate.”
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You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. By BRIAN X. CHEN At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who is attending the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. 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  • At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.
  • Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who attended the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. (In addition,
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A.I. Comes to the Operating Room - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Brain surgeons are bringing artificial intelligence and new imaging techniques into the operating room, to diagnose tumors as accurately as pathologists, and much faster, according to a report in the journal Nature Medicine.
  • The traditional method, which requires sending the tissue to a lab, freezing and staining it, then peering at it through a microscope, takes 20 to 30 minutes or longer. The new technique takes two and a half minutes.
  • In addition to speeding up the process, the new technique can also detect some details that traditional methods may miss, like the spread of a tumor along nerve fibers
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  • The new process may also help in other procedures where doctors need to analyze tissue while they are still operating, such as head and neck, breast, skin and gynecologic surgery, the report said. It also noted that there is a shortage of neuropathologists, and suggested that the new technology might help fill the gap in medical centers that lack the specialty. Video Advertisement LIVE 00:00 1:05
  • Algorithms are also being developed to help detect lung cancers on CT scans, diagnose eye disease in people with diabetes and find cancer on microscope slides.
  • The diagnoses were later judged right or wrong based on whether they agreed with the findings of lengthier and more extensive tests performed after the surgery.The result was a draw: humans, 93.9 percent correct; A.I., 94.6 percent.
  • At some centers, he said, brain surgeons do not even order frozen sections because they do not trust them and prefer to wait for tissue processing after the surgery, which may take weeks to complete.
  • Some types of brain tumor are so rare that there is not enough data on them to train an A.I. system, so the system in the study was designed to essentially toss out samples it could not identify.
  • “It won’t change brain surgery,” he said, “but it’s going to add a significant new tool, more significant than they’ve stated.”
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