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katherineharron

Ben & Jerry's statement on white supremacy is so extraordinary. Here's why - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The ice cream maker has called on Americans to "dismantle white supremacy" and "grapple with the sins of our past" as nationwide protests against racial injustice stretch into their eighth day.
  • Ben & Jerry's describes the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a white police officer as the result of "inhumane police brutality that is perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy."
  • "What happened to George Floyd was not the result of a bad apple; it was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and culture that has treated Black bodies as the enemy from the beginning," said the brand, which is owned by Unilever (UL).
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • the statement from Ben & Jerry's is unusually comprehensive and direct, addressing the historical roots of discrimination in the United States and calling out systemic racism, while advocating specific policies to prevent further police abuses and redress racial inequality.
  • Ben & Jerry's, which also publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement, called on President Donald Trump to disavow white supremacists and nationalist groups that "overtly support him."
  • The ice cream maker also called for the US Department of Justice to reinvigorate its Civil Rights Division, and for Congress to pass H.R. 40, a bill that would create a commission to study the effects of discrimination since African slaves first arrived in North America in 1619 and recommend remedies.
  • The company's sale to British-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever (UL) in 2000 has not prevented it from speaking out on issues such as racial injustice, climate change and refugee rights. As part of the deal, Ben & Jerry's kept an independent board of directors. "We're a wholly owned subsidiary [of Unilever], but we still act according to Ben & Jerry's mission, vision and values," a spokesperson told CNN Business.
  • "Unless and until white America is willing to collectively acknowledge its privilege, take responsibility for its past and the impact it has on the present, and commit to creating a future steeped in justice, the list of names that George Floyd has been added to will never end. We have to use this moment to accelerate our nation's long journey towards justice and a more perfect union," the statement concluded.
blythewallick

Opinion | Trump's Gut, and the Gutting of American Credibility - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-kurds-syria.html

politics Bias

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • President Trump has given a master class in the unhappy link between his “gut” and the gutting of American credibility.
  • From Trump’s sort-of green light to Turkey’s assault on northern Syria, to his threat to “totally destroy and obliterate” the Turkish economy, to his Chamberlain-like dismissal of Kurds’ fate (“We are 7,000 miles away!”), he has played the clown in chief.
  • Europeans now shrug when they don’t laugh. The consensus is the United States has lost it. There’s nobody home. A child-president in the Oval Office writes a letter to the Turkish leader who appropriately tosses it in the garbage.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • America’s word is worth less today than at any time since 1945. Trust is not an easily recoverable commodity. Solemn accords entered into by the United States, like the Iran nuclear deal, are ripped up — and replaced by empty threats. Friends like the Kurds who have shed blood to inflict great harm on the Islamic State are betrayed. Day after day a president for whom facts don’t matter dismantles the idea of truth.
  • A recent report from Patrick Wintour in The Guardian quoted the Saudi ambassador to Britain calling Trump a “tweet monster” and saying the abrupt American troop withdrawal from northern Syria “does not give one incredible confidence.”
  • Sure, but this Middle East demeans the sacrifice of the thousands of Americans who died for something better, and makes a nonsense of the nearly trillion American dollars spent to that end. Trump is not cutting losses; he’s perpetuating them. Iran could not have asked for American chaos more conducive to its interests. Nor could Putin, al-Assad and Erdogan.
  • Trump folded to Turkey’s Kurd Derangement Syndrome. Even the plankton known as the Republican Party were so appalled that some lawmakers developed sufficient backbone to protest.
  • “Foreign policy is what I’ll be remembered for,” Trump has said. Damn right.
katherineharron

List: Two more members of Congress test positive for Covid-19 - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham of South Carolina and Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania are the latest members of Congress to test positive for Covid-19, their offices announced Friday.
  • In addition, more than two dozen lawmakers have also self-quarantined or taken other steps to isolate themselves as a precaution after interacting either directly or potentially with an infected individual.
johnsonel7

Scientists Identify Neurons That Help the Brain Forget - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-memory-forgetting-mind.html

memory research brain science

shared by johnsonel7 on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • One afternoon in April 1929, a journalist from a Moscow newspaper turned up in Alexander Luria’s office with an unusual problem: He never forgot things.Dr. Luria, a neuropsychologist, proceeded to test the man, who later became known as subject S., by spouting long strings of numbers and words, foreign poems and scientific formulas, all of which S. recited back without fail. Decades later, S. still remembered the lists of numbers perfectly whenever Dr. Luria retested him.
  • “We’re inundated with so much information every day, and much of that information is turned into memories in the brain,” said Ronald Davis, a neurobiologist at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla. “We simply cannot deal with all of it.”
  • Researchers like Dr. Davis argue that forgetting is an active mechanism that the brain employs to clear out unnecessary pieces of information so we can retain new ones. Others have gone a step further, suggesting that forgetting is required for the mental flexibility inherent in creative thinking and imagination.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • These results suggest that hypothalamic M.C.H. neurons help the brain actively forget new information that is not important,” Dr. Yamanaka said. And because the neurons are most active during R.E.M. sleep, they may explain why humans usually do not remember their dreams when they wake up. “The neurons may be clearing up memory resources for the next day,”
  • If the memory is really important to the organism, or to us as humans, then this attention or emotional interest will come in and act like a judge, telling the brain, ‘Keep this one, protect it
katherineharron

Postal service forced to keep working despite shortages of cash and protection - CNNPol... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • United States Postal Service workers, who are still delivering and sorting mail at distribution centers around the country even as millions of Americans telecommute, are worried that they may not have the protection -- or even the funding -- they will need to keep delivering mail for months longer.
  • Reports have popped up across the country where postal workers say they don't have hand sanitizer, gloves or masks, and are being told to work despite illnesses and are looking to community donations to address supply shortfalls.
  • Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said postal workers in her region have said they don't have hand sanitizer or materials needed to keep post offices disinfected.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • For years, USPS has struggled to stay afloat with the emergence of technology threatening their bottom line, but coronavirus has further strained their financial situation as mail volume has declined. The Postal Service has warned that it could be insolvent by June, the House Oversight Committee said this week.
  • "The Postal Service remains concerned that this measure will be insufficient to enable the Postal Service to withstand the significant downturn in our business that could directly result from the pandemic," said USPS spokesman David Partenheimer. "Under a worst case scenario, such downturn could result in the Postal Service having insufficient liquidity to continue operations."
katherineharron

Fox Business parts ways with Trish Regan, host who dismissed coronavirus as 'impeachmen... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The Fox Business Network announced on Friday that it had parted ways with Trish Regan, the conservative news host who ignited controversy earlier this month when she dismissed the coronavirus pandemic as a conspiracy to throw President Trump out of office.
  • Regan faced fierce criticism earlier this month when she described the coronavirus to her viewers as an "impeachment scam."
  • "This is impeachment all over again," Regan said at the time, claiming Trump's critics were using the pandemic to spark panic and destabilize the economy to harm his chances of being re-elected.
melnikju

The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot - Glenn Gree... - 0 views

greenwald.substack.com/...e-false-and-exaggerated-claims

shared by melnikju on 17 Feb 21 - No Cached
    • melnikju
      melnikju on 17 Feb 21
       
      Both conservatives and liberals, people on any side of the argument, are trying to twist it to make themselves look better
  • But none of the other four deaths were at the hands of the protesters: the only other person killed with deliberate violence was a pro-Trump protester, Ashli Babbitt, unarmed when shot in the neck by a police officer at close range. The other three deaths were all pro-Trump protesters: Kevin Greeson, who died of a heart attack outside the Capitol; Benjamin Philips, 50, “the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo,” who died of a stroke that day; and Rosanne Boyland, a fanatical Trump supporter whom the Times says was inadvertently “killed in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line.”
    • melnikju
      melnikju on 17 Feb 21
       
      Obviously, news coverage wouldn't want to make the rioters look innocent or hurt at any point, so they wouldn't want to cover this
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The problem with this story is that it is false in all respects.
  • nobody saw video of it. No photographs depicted it. To this day, no autopsy report has been released. No details from any official source have been provided.
  • “with a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”
  • does not say whether it came from the police or protesters.
  • With the impeachment trial now over, the articles are now rewritten to reflect that the original story was false. But there was nothing done by The New York Times to explain an error of this magnitude, let alone to try to undo the damage it did by misleading the public. They did not expressly retract or even “correct” the story.
  • far-right forums
    • melnikju
      melnikju on 17 Feb 21
       
      dividing people more by using labels that are extreme
  • and the FBI has acknowledged it has no evidence to the contrary
  • So it matters a great deal legally, but also politically, if the U.S. really did suffer an armed insurrection and continues to face one. Though there is no controlling, clear definition, that term usually connotes not a three-hour riot but an ongoing, serious plot by a faction of the citizenry to overthrow or otherwise subvert the government.
  • people rightly conclude the propaganda is deliberate and trust in journalism erodes further.
  • One can — and should — condemn the January 6 riot without inflating the threat it posed. And one can — and should — insist on both factual accuracy and sober restraint without standing accused of sympathy for the rioters.
Javier E

This Time-Management Trick Changed My Whole Relationship With Time - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pomodoro-technique.html

time management personal philosophy time-management variety psychology

shared by Javier E on 24 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • A couple of years ago I was told a rumor about a notable artist who would break up everything she did, from making films in the day to running her studio in the afternoon to reading books in the evening, into intervals of 25 minutes, with five-minute breaks in between — 25 minutes on, five minutes off, over and over again.
  • the Pomodoro technique. Invented by Francesco Cirillo, a student at Rome’s Luiss Business School in the late 1980s, it’s a time-management method that takes its name from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used to regulate its core process, breaking the day into brief intervals
  • A pomodoro, once started, must not be interrupted, otherwise it has to be abandoned
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  • there is relief: You are not allowed to extend a pomodoro, either. After a set of four 25-minute intervals are completed, you’re supposed to take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes before continuing.
  • It tells us when to start, and also when to stop; and now, more than ever, we have to be told when to stop.
  • An unquestioned assumption in our culture holds that the more hours spent on work — whether a passion project or office drudgery — the better we’ll perform and the more successful and happier we’ll be. What if none of that’s true?
  • Leisure time has also taken on a timeless, hypnotic quality lately. Everything our culture produces feels at once never-ending and meaningless — or perhaps meaningless because it’s never-ending.
  • An everlasting present expands around us in all directions, and it’s easy to get lost in there — all the more reason to set some boundaries.
  • Now that my breaks are short and fleeting, I think more carefully about what I’d like to do with them, and I’ve found it’s quite different from the unimaginative temptations I would otherwise default to
  • Instead I’ll make a sandwich, do a quick French lesson, reply to a few texts, have a shower, go to the laundromat; and such humdrum activities, now that they’re restricted, have become sources of great pleasure.
  • I’ve found that tackling a range of tasks in short bursts keeps things interesting and provides a more rounded life.
  • Variety is the sugar that helps the medicine go down; not the mirage of variety conjured by infinite scrolling content, by nearly a hundred different flavors of Oreos, but the genuine variety of pursuing different sorts of interests every day.
  • time-management techniques are for me a way of better understanding which things matter and which don’t.
  • time management makes time uncanny by revealing how it speeds up and slows down throughout the day, and how many different ways 25 minutes can feel;
  • it’s not an exaggeration to say that, by changing my relationship with and appreciation of time, the technique has brought me to some profound existential questions about whether I’m wasting my life — my fragile, fleeting life — on activities I neither care about nor enjoy
  • It has forced me to think about what I’d most like to be doing every day instead. It has made me see time afresh — as something we really don’t have enough of, as something precious precisely because it’s ephemeral.
Javier E

Opinion | Mass testing has its problems. They're nothing compared to not testing. - The... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-970a-64c73a1c2392_story.html

testing mass statistics innumeracy numeracy probability probabilistic thinking

shared by Javier E on 31 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Short of a vaccine, mass testing is among the most plausible paths back to some kind of normalcy.
  • Imagine a world where you could stop at a drive-through testing center, get a result in 20 minutes or so, and then motor onward to your dinner party with a “negative” certificate in hand. Imagine outdoor kiosks at airports, with a negative test result required to get inside. Imagine offices, even restaurants or bars, with a nurse stationed in the parking lot.
  • Would this be annoying and cumbersome? Yes. Would it be a vast improvement on what we are doing now? Also yes. It even seems plausible since Abbott Labs has won emergency approval for a test that costs $5, returns an answer in 15 minutes, requires no specialized equipment and can be produced in bulk. Mass deployment of this test, or others like it, could fundamentally change how we approach covid-19.
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  • No test is perfectly accurate; all generate false positives and false negatives. How many varies by the test — the new Abbott Labs test, for example, has a false negative rate of about 3 percent and a false positive rate of about 1.5 percent.
  • We’d also require public understanding that test results are a risk-assessment tool rather than a definitive answer. And shifting the public’s thinking might be harder than shifting Trump.
  • Doing that would also require fundamentally changing our thinking.
  • For mass testing to work, people will need to understand that even an event where all attendees just tested negative isn’t necessarily covid-free, because some false negatives might have slipped through
  • Giving hundreds of millions of citizens this crash course in elementary statistics would be very difficult. Teaching people how to think about a positive result would be even harder — especially if mass testing does its job of reducing caseloads. Because as case numbers fall, false positives will become a bigger and bigger problem.
  • Say we’re testing 200 people, 10 of whom have covid-19. Given its rate of false negatives, the Abbott test would probably catch all 10. But with false positives, it could also tell one or two people who don’t have covid-19 that they’re infected. That’s not ideal — as good citizens, they’d have to go home and quarantine. But a more sensitive follow-up test could substantially mitigate this problem, shortening such quarantines to a day or so. It would be worth it to get those 10 true positives out of circulation.
  • Doing this, we might eventually reduce the share of the population that’s infected to, say, 0.5 percent from 5 percent. Unfortunately, the false positive rate won’t budge, so now for every one true positive uncovered, roughly three false positives would still be generated.
  • That’s inherently costly: Every false positive means skipping your flight, rehearsal or birthday party. But it would be catastrophic if people didn’t understand that a positive covid-19 test is a guideline, not a guarantee
  • People who think that they’ve had covid-19, when they haven’t, are apt to go out and engage in risky behavior, maybe a lot of it. And if mass testing ever becomes common, there could be a lot of those people.
  • So mass testing isn’t just a matter of getting a test that is cheap enough and plentiful enough; the administration and the public must be educated to use this bounty wisely. That’s a hard messaging problem. Given the alternative, though, it’s the kind of problem we’d really like to have.
Javier E

Opinion | Standard metrics won't suffice. Here's how to measure Trump's failures so the... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html

metrics comparative statistics rhetoric language psychology

shared by Javier E on 04 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Maybe what’s needed are different units for measuring the Trump administration’s failures and scandals, since the standard metrics aren’t registering. His record should be quantified in scales that a Fox News viewer might be more familiar with: not body counts or dollars, but Benghazis and Solyndras.
  • For instance, sometimes pundits try to put the 183,000 covid-19 deaths in context by noting that cumulative deaths per capita in the United States are double those of Canada, quintuple those of Germany, 20 times those of Australia, 90 times those of South Korea, and so on.
  • here’s a different way to contextualize this national trauma: The number of lives lost to covid-19 is roughly equal to the death toll of 60 9/11 attacks.
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  • Last week alone, though, 1.6 million people newly applied for unemployment benefits. That’s the equivalent of 2,300 Carrier plants
  • Somehow, for years, the four tragic deaths in Benghazi consumed the agenda of six GOP-controlled congressional committees and the programming of the most-watched cable news channel. But today, a deadly shock magnified by government ineptitude that has led to 46,000 times as many lives lost “is what it is.”
  • the coronavirus death toll is about 46,000 Benghazis
  • According to congressional investigators, Navarro negotiated a contract that resulted in the government overpaying for ventilators by $500 million. (The contract was canceled Monday.) He also championed a $765 million federal loan to Eastman Kodak to transform it into a drugmaker. (The loan has since unraveled and is the subject of a securities investigation.)
  • So how many taxpayer dollars was Navarro involved in wasting through these two deals alone? Measured in units that should be familiar to consumers of right-wing news, it’s roughly two Solyndras.
  • The debt increase under Trump during a single term is on track to surpass that under Obama across two terms.
  • For each Hillary Clinton private email scandal (one), there are at least eight senior Trump officials who have reportedly used private email to conduct official business
  • For every Obama-era incident involving supposed retaliation against political opponents, there are literally dozens of instances of Trump trying to use the power of his office to punish perceived enemie
Javier E

A Coded Word From the Far Right Roils France's Political Mainstream - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vagement-far-right-racism.html

language bias france

shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • As with many things in France, an unresolved colonial history lies below the surface of the battle over the word ensauvagement.
  • The word is a direct outgrowth of France’s colonial and slave-trading past, a history that the French have yet to come to terms with and that they have often preferred to ignore, said Pascal Blanchard, a historian on French colonialism and its enduring impact on French society.
  • More than any other imperial power, France justified colonialism by describing it as a “civilizing mission,” Mr. Blanchard said.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • “The idea of guiding savages out of the darkness into the light was omnipresent in France’s discourse,” he said. “The idea of the savage is still deeply rooted in French society.”
  • “The word benefits from ambiguity and works in France’s collective consciousness by letting the person using it avoid being directly called a racist,
  • “Césaire goes further by saying that Nazism was the product of the ensauvagement of Europe,” said Pap Ndiaye, a historian who led efforts to establish Black studies in France, adding that a genocide committed by Germans in their former African colony in what is now Namibia in the early 20th century is widely regarded as a precursor of the Holocaust.
  • But stripped of its historical meaning, ensauvagement can literally mean, in French, the state of becoming wild.
  • Aimé Césaire, the anticolonial writer from Martinique, even tried to turn the word ensauvagement against Europe in the 1950s. In “Discourse on Colonialism,” he wrote that Europeans had dehumanized themselves through the brutality of colonialism in Africa and that they themselves had turned into savages.
  • That is why the word appeared to have slipped into the mainstream recently, he said.
  • “It is necessary to stop the ensauvagement of a certain part of the society,” Mr. Darmanin, the interior minister, told the newspaper Le Figaro in late July.
  • “There are no savages in France,” Sacha Houlié, a lawmaker, told the minister in Parliament. “There are only citizens.”
  • The minister defended himself, saying that his use of the word had nothing to do with immigration or ethnicity, adding, “I’m miles away from that.”
  • In an interview this week, Mr. Houlié said that Mr. Macron and his party came to power in 2017 promising to reconcile the French. But by using ensauvagement, he said, “We recreate divisions, we create new fractures.”
  • The justice minister, Eric Dupont-Moretti, told a French radio station on Monday that he would not use the term because “ensauvagement is a word that fuels the feeling of insecurity.”
  • The very same day, Marlène Schiappa, a junior minister for equality, said, “It doesn’t bother me to talk about an ensauvagement of society, because it’s a reality, quite simply.”
  • Mr. Darmanin hardened his position by insisting its usage was legitimate — a stance considered especially significant because he oversees the national police as interior minister
  • “Ensauvagement is coded language to mean young, violent youths of sub-Saharan or North African origin,” Mr. Ndiaye said. “And that opens the door to policies on immigration, police checkpoints, and it could be used to justify police violence.”
  • “If police officers are dealing with savages, well, then, it’s legitimate that they use violent means to control these so-called savages,” he said
Javier E

What If Fox News Viewers Watched CNN Instead? - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ws-viewers-watched-cnn-instead

fox news experiment trial rival perspectives change of mind research bias

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • The establishment of Fox News in the late 1990s forever changed both media and politics in America, transforming the formerly staid world of television news into the series of political shoutfests we know and love-hate today.
  • the question persists: Does watching Fox News actually change voters’ minds?
  • Comparing markets that had received Fox to those where it was not yet available, the study concluded that the presence of Fox News was good for a Republican gain of 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points between the 1996 and 2000 elections. It was a decidedly modest effect — but large enough to sway that super-close election.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Only committed conservatives, the theory goes, would bother to tune in to Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, so what difference could it make what they say?
  • Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead.
  • Then the treatment group of switchers and the control group of non-switchers took three waves of surveys about the news.
  • The results: Not only did CNN and Fox cover different things during the September 2020 survey period, but the audience of committed Fox viewers, which started the month with conservative predispositions, changed their minds on many issues.
  • Switchers were five percentage points more likely to believe that people suffer from long Covid, for example, and six points more likely to believe that many foreign countries did a better job than the U.S. of controlling the virus.
  • They were seven points more likely to support voting by mail. And they were 10 points less likely to believe that supporters of then-candidate Joe Biden were happy when police officers get shot, 11 points less likely to say it’s more important for the president to focus on containing violent protesters than on the coronavirus, and 13 points less likely to agree that if Biden were elected, “we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”
  • These are meaningful differences, even if the group that switched to CNN remained very right-wing in their view of the American political landscape.
  • these are reasonably large changes from a one-month experiment. And they occurred despite the long-term effort of then-President Donald Trump to discredit CNN and other mainstream media outlets.
  • one of the things that switchers changed their minds about was Fox News itself: They became more skeptical that Fox would cover a story that reflected poorly on Trump, even if it were true.
  • This mode of political influence, where partisan media can simply ignore stories that are inconvenient, is a potentially powerful challenge to democratic accountability.
  • It’s also probably not symmetrical. Even media outlets that skew liberal in their coverage generally don’t shy away from covering the Covid death toll or the rise in inflation.
  • one lesson they can take from this experiment is that nobody is impossible to reach.
  • Broockman and Kalla’s research indicates that information flows at the margin really do matter. Any opportunity to present new facts to people, and new arguments, is valuable.
Javier E

Climate Change Data Deluge Has Scientists Scrambling for Solutions - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ling-for-solutions-11638720016

climate change data technology research

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • For decades, scientists working to predict changes in the climate relied mostly on calculations involving simple laws of physics and chemistry but little data from the real world. But with temperatures world-wide continuing to rise—and with data-collection techniques and technologies continuing to advance—scientists now rely on meticulous measurements of temperatures, ocean currents, soil moisture, air quality, cloud cover and hundreds of other phenomena on Earth and in its atmosphere.
  • “Now we can truly do climate studies because now we have observations to precisely say how weather trends have changed and are changing,
  • “When you are trying to develop long-term environmental records, including climate records, consistent measurement is incredibly valuable,” says Kevin Murphy, who as NASA’s chief science data officer oversees an archive of Earth observation data used by 3.9 million people last year. “It’s irreplaceable data.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Over the next decade, officials managing the main U.S. repositories of climate-related information expect their archives’ total volume to grow from about 83 petabytes today to more than 650 petabytes.
  • One petabyte of digital memory can hold thousands of feature-length movies, with 650 enough to hold the contents of the Library of Congress 30 times over.
  • All that information, though, is more than conventional data storage can handle and more than any human mind can readily assimilate,
  • To accommodate it all, the federal workers tasked with managing the data are moving it into the cloud, which offers almost unlimited memory storage while eliminating the need for scientists to maintain their own on-site archive
  • archive managers are devising new analytical techniques and adapting a standard format for the data no matter who collected it and who wants to study it.
  • In essence, they are reinventing climate science from the ground up.
  • “We are in the midst of a technology evolution,
  • As of last September, government agencies and private companies had about 900 Earth-orbiting satellites gathering data about our planet, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That is almost three times as many as were aloft in 2008. More are being readied for launch.
  • ASA’s $1 billion Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission will measure Earth’s lakes, rivers and oceans in the first detailed global survey of the planet’s surface water.
  • That is a drop in the data bucket compared with the space agency’s $1.5 billion Nisar radar imaging satellite, which is scheduled for launch in January 2023. Its sensors will detect movements of the planet’s land, ice sheets and sea ice as small as 0.4 inches, transmitting 80 terabytes of data every day.
  • With current data handling systems and typical internet connections, it would take a climate researcher about a year to download just four days’ worth of Nisar dat
  • NASA and NOAA are working with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Corp. to move their climate databases into the cloud.
  • Earlier this year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the first time used data on past climate behavior to gauge the reliability of climate models for policy makers.
Javier E

Pandemic-Era Politics Are Ruining Public Education - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...622824

learning teaching trends school history ideology books reading research social social media technology psychology

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.
  • Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are
  • Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • It isn’t clear how the American public-school system will survive the COVID years. Teachers, whose relative pay and status have been in decline for decades, are fleeing the field. In 2021, buckling under the stresses of the pandemic, nearly 1 million people quit jobs in public education, a 40 percent increase over the previous year.
  • These kids, and the investments that come with them, may never return—the beginning of a cycle of attrition that could continue long after the pandemic ends and leave public schools even more underfunded and dilapidated than before. “It’s an open question whether the public-school system will recover,” Steiner said. “That is a real concern for democratic education.”
  • The high-profile failings of public schools during the pandemic have become a political problem for Democrats, because of their association with unions, prolonged closures, and the pedagogy of social justice, which can become a form of indoctrination.
  • The party that stands for strong government services in the name of egalitarian principles supported the closing of schools far longer than either the science or the welfare of children justified, and it has been woefully slow to acknowledge how much this damaged the life chances of some of America’s most disadvantaged students.
  • Public education is too important to be left to politicians and ideologues. Public schools still serve about 90 percent of children across red and blue America.
  • Since the common-school movement in the early 19th century, the public school has had an exalted purpose in this country. It’s our core civic institution—not just because, ideally, it brings children of all backgrounds together in a classroom, but because it prepares them for the demands and privileges of democratic citizenship. Or at least, it needs to.
  • What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,”
  • “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”
  • School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens.
  • Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think.
  • If the answer were simply to push more and more kids into college, the United States would be entering its democratic prime
  • So the question isn’t just how much education, but what kind. Is it quaint, or utopian, to talk about teaching our children to be capable of governing themselves?
  • The COVID era, with Donald Trump out of office but still in power and with battles over mask mandates and critical race theory convulsing Twitter and school-board meetings, shows how badly Americans are able to think about our collective problems—let alone read, listen, empathize, debate, reconsider, and persuade in the search for solutions.
  • democratic citizenship can, at least in part, be learned.
  • he orthodoxies currently fighting for our children’s souls turn the teaching of U.S. history into a static and morally simple quest for some American essence. They proceed from celebration or indictment toward a final judgment—innocent or guilty—and bury either oppression or progress in a subordinate clause. The most depressing thing about this gloomy pedagogy of ideologies in service to fragile psyches is how much knowledge it takes away from students who already have so little
  • The history warriors build their metaphysics of national good or evil on a foundation of ignorance. In a 2019 survey, only 40 percent of Americans were able to pass the test that all applicants for U.S. citizenship must take, which asks questions like “Who did the United States fight in World War II?” and “We elect a President for how many years?” The only state in which a majority passed was Vermont.
  • A central goal for history, social-studies, and civics instruction should be to give students something more solid than spoon-fed maxims—to help them engage with the past on its own terms, not use it as a weapon in the latest front of the culture wars.
  • W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
  • The truth requires a grounding in historical facts, but facts are quickly forgotten without meaning and context
  • The goal isn’t just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents.
  • This kind of instruction, which requires teachers to distinguish between exposure and indoctrination, isn’t easy; it asks them to be more sophisticated professionals than their shabby conditions and pay (median salary: $62,000, less than accountants and transit police) suggest we are willing to support.
  • To do that, we’ll need to help kids restore at least part of their crushed attention spans.
  • staring at a screen for hours is a heavy depressant, especially for teenagers.
  • we’ll look back on the amount of time we let our children spend online with the same horror that we now feel about earlier generations of adults who hooked their kids on smoking.
  • “It’s not a choice between tech or no tech,” Bill Tally, a researcher with the Education Development Center, told me. “The question is what tech infrastructure best enables the things we care about,” such as deep engagement with instructional materials, teachers, and other students.
  • The pandemic should have forced us to reassess what really matters in public school; instead, it’s a crisis that we’ve just about wasted.
  • Like learning to read as historians, learning to sift through the tidal flood of memes for useful, reliable information can emancipate children who have been heedlessly hooked on screens by the adults in their lives
  • Finally, let’s give children a chance to read books—good books. It’s a strange feature of all the recent pedagogical innovations that they’ve resulted in the gradual disappearance of literature from many classrooms.
  • The best way to interest young people in literature is to have them read good literature, and not just books that focus with grim piety on the contemporary social and psychological problems of teenagers.
  • We sell them insultingly short in thinking that they won’t read unless the subject is themselves. Mirrors are ultimately isolating; young readers also need windows, even if the view is unfamiliar, even if it’s disturbing
  • connection through language to universal human experience and thought is the reward of great literature, a source of empathy and wisdom.
  • The culture wars, with their atmosphere of resentment, fear, and petty faultfinding, are hostile to the writing and reading of literature.
  • Releasing them to do “research” in the vast ocean of the internet without maps and compasses, as often happens, guarantees that they will drown before they arrive anywhere.
  • The classroom has become a half-abandoned battlefield, where grown-ups who claim to be protecting students from the virus, from books, from ideologies and counter-ideologies end up using children to protect themselves and their own entrenched camps.
  • American democracy can’t afford another generation of adults who don’t know how to talk and listen and think. We owe our COVID-scarred children the means to free themselves from the failures of the past and the present.
  • Students are leaving as well. Since 2020, nearly 1.5 million children have been removed from public schools to attend private or charter schools or be homeschooled.
  • “COVID has encouraged poor parents to question the quality of public education. We are seeing diminished numbers of children in our public schools, particularly our urban public schools.” In New York, more than 80,000 children have disappeared from city schools; in Los Angeles, more than 26,000; in Chicago, more than 24,000.
peterconnelly

Opinion: Want to keep your employees happy? Offer these 5 things - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • To attract workers in today's tight labor market, companies are touting better workplace amenities. Amazon is running ads about the company's pay and benefits. Levi Strauss is offering to cover travel costs for workers seeking abortions. Airbnb is allowing its employees to permanently work remotely. This is a workers' paradise in the making.
  • People crave predictability. Surprises make it harder for employees to plan their lives and have peace of mind. When constant change is inflicted on them, without a chance to anticipate it or participate in decisions about it, people get anxious and passive, and dream of escape.
  • Now, increasing numbers of people demand the ability to choose when, where and how to work.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • This made the employee feel like remote work was just another set of disempowering rules.
  • Workers clearly felt empowered by having more control over their own work life. Companies must give people choices that match their unique work and life needs.
  • But they also made clear that willingness to stay with the current employer is also a matter of whether their direct managers can deliver on five other factors beyond the paycheck that keep people happy, productive and on the team.
  • For instance, workers who get unexpected spot bonuses sometimes feel that they don't know what to count on when calculating their future compensation; they'd rather have a predictable total package.
  • People thrive when their value is acknowledged by getting more responsibility, recognition and stature, such as a bigger title.
  • Jobs that convey a sense of purpose and meaning are more likely to exercise an emotional hold on people. Whether or not the company overall thinks it stands for social responsibility, people want to see that chance to make a difference in their immediate work experience.
  • Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to improve employment circumstances is to get an offer from a new company. That shouldn't have to be the case. Managers who want to retain people should act as if they are just now hiring them.
  • The best labor pool could be the one companies already have. They should treat their people as a precious resource and give them what they want from work. Rewarding them will reward the business.
peterconnelly

Ukrainians see their culture being erased as Russia hits beloved sites - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...a-hits-beloved-sites-rcna29972

culture russia

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • “This was intentional. It was a prepared plan. They knew that this legacy was here,” Micay said, wading through the scorched remains, pointing to where paintings, sculptures and books had filled the rooms during her nearly 30 years as the museum director.
  • “This was done so Russia can say that there is no Ukrainian culture, that Ukrainian identity does not exist.”
  • Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Ukrainian officials have accused Moscow of intentionally attacking hundreds of cultural sites, which is a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Russian troops burned down a museum in the town of Ivankiv that housed a collection of paintings by the renowned Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko, who was an inspiration to Pablo Picasso. The House of Culture in Lozova was razed by a Russian missile. Other theaters, churches, monuments and libraries have been destroyed. 
  • Ukraine’s Minister of Culture Oleksandr Tkachenko said his office has recorded more than 350 “Russian war crimes against cultural heritage” as of May 19.
  • Attacks on cultural property are not uncommon during wartime, said Richard Kurin, a cultural anthropologist and the founder of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative.
  • “In conflict, you get situations where people want to erase someone else’s culture,” Kurin said. 
  • “It’s demoralizing to people because people’s culture is highly symbolic and it gives them a sense of identity and morale,” Kurin said. “If you think about what the Ukrainians are fighting for, a lot of it has to do with their being Ukrainian.”
  • “The majority of damage to cultural property has been through collateral damage and the way that the Russian Federation is fighting the conflict,”
  • But whether the attacks are indiscriminate or targeted, Stone said Ukraine was at risk of losing irreplaceable cultural sites and artifacts that make up the fabric of Ukrainian identity.
  • “The Kharkiv legacy is in danger,” he said. “This is all part of Russia’s genocide of Ukrainian culture and national identity.”
peterconnelly

Opinion | What to Do About Americans Who Love Their Guns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...anti-gun-ad-campaign.html

guns new york times opinion

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s, a kid took in a fair number of public service messages.
  • Obviously, not everyone transformed into responsible citizens while imbibing these messages between doses of Sugar Pops and “Scooby-Doo.”
  • But simple messages stick, and when done well — particularly when lives are at stake — have proven highly effective.
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  • Not only does this country have more guns than people, but over the last 30 years, Americans have grown less supportive of stricter gun laws. Astonishingly, in 1959, 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on handguns except those used by police officers and other authorized persons; today that figure is 19 percent.
  • Bearing in mind that the killers in Texas and Buffalo were both only 18, we could try to get through to the next generation.
  • Make guns less cool, less acceptable, less a part of the supposedly “American way of life.” Scare people. Gross them out. Even try humor.
  • Or it could go personal, using a testimonial from a child who lost his sister in a school shooting or a teenager whose friend committed suicide at 14 using a weapon kept in the house by his own parents.
  • Public education and creative P.S.A.s helped reduce teenage cigarette use significantly. While in the pocket of the tobacco industry, Hollywood played a key role in glamorizing smoking, but then later, after paid tobacco product placement was banned, clamped down on the appearance of smoking on film and TV. Those efforts are ongoing.
  • Sometimes, of course, a cigarette, like a gun, is key to a movie’s story line or characters
  • Through technology and schools, it could bring kids into creating and disseminating the message.
peterconnelly

6 Podcasts About the Dark Side of the Internet - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dark-web-podcasts.html

new york times podcasts

shared by peterconnelly on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Online life is no longer optional for most people. The pandemic only accelerated a shift already underway, turning the internet into our school, office and social lifeline.
  • the internet’s tightening grip on every aspect of life isn’t without costs
  • These six shows tap into some of those dangers, exploring cybercrime, cryptocurrency and the many flavors of horror that lurk on the dark web.
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  • Recent episodes have focused on mainstream tech stories — the crypto crash, the Netflix bubble bursting — but others go down truly weird rabbit holes, like the mysterious world of Katie Couric CBD scams on Facebook.
  • Begun during the early days of quarantine in March 2020, this affable show feels like eavesdropping on a conversation between two internet-savvy friends
  • “One Click” explores the stories of other young DNP victims, whose deaths were all caused by a combination of predatory marketing, toxic diet culture and unregulated online pharmacies. It’s upsetting but vital listening.
  • Delving into the deepest recesses of the dark web, “Hunting Warhead” follows a monthslong investigation by Einar Stangvik, the hacker, and Hakon Hoydal, the journalist, that ultimately led to the downfall of a local politician.
  • In a bizarre twist, the hack turned out to be motivated by the impending release of a movie named “The Interview,” (starring Seth Rogen and James Franco), which depicted a fictional plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un of North Korea.
  • This wry, richly reported podcast from the BBC World Service chronicles every twist and turn of the saga and its implications far beyond Hollywood.
  • Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, told stories inspired specifically by the quixotic virtual communities Reddit creates and the everyday mysteries it spotlights. (One classic episode focuses on a Reddit thread about a man who stumbled on a huge, inexplicable pile of plates in rural Pennsylvania.)
  • Cybercrime has snowballed so rapidly that the world has been caught off guard; last year’s ransomware attack on a major U.S. pipeline highlighted just how vulnerable many of our institutions are, not to mention our individual data.
  • The hosts, Dave Bittner and Joe Carrigan, are cybersecurity experts who emphasize solutions as they unfurl tales of social engineering, phishing scams and online con artists of every stripe.
peterconnelly

How Some States Are Combating Election Misinformation Ahead of Midterms - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sheriff-election-midterms.html

new york times states election

shared by peterconnelly on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Ahead of the 2020 elections, Connecticut confronted a bevy of falsehoods about voting that swirled around online. One, widely viewed on Facebook, wrongly said absentee ballots had been sent to dead people. On Twitter, users spread a false post that a tractor-trailer carrying ballots had crashed on Interstate 95, sending thousands of voter slips into the air and across the highway.
  • the state plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting, and to create its first-ever position for an expert in combating misinformation.
  • With a salary of $150,000, the person is expected to comb fringe sites like 4chan, far-ri
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • ght social networks like Gettr and Rumble, and mainstream social media sites to root out early misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral, and then urge the companies to remove or flag the posts that contain false information.
  • These states, most of them under Democratic control, have been acting as voter confidence in election integrity has plummeted.
  • In an ABC/Ipsos poll from January, only 20 percent of respondents said they were “very confident” in the integrity of the election system and 39 percent said they felt “somewhat confident.”
  • Some conservatives and civil rights groups are almost certain to complain that the efforts to limit misinformation could restrict free speech.
  • “State and local governments are well situated to reduce harms from dis- and misinformation by providing timely, accurate and trustworthy information,” said Rachel Goodman
  • “Facts still exist, and lies are being used to chip away at our fundamental freedoms,” Ms. Griswold said.
  • Officials said they would prefer candidates fluent in both English and Spanish, to address the spread of misinformation in both languages. The officer would track down viral misinformation posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, and look for emerging narratives and memes, especially on fringe social media platforms and the dark web.
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