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Truth to tell: populism and the immigration debate | British Politics and Policy at LSE - 0 views

  • Truth to tell: populism and the immigration debate
  • The populist surge that helped propel Brexit isn’t going to help the UK take control of its borders, writes Tim Bale. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives have been honest with voters about immigration policy, and that shows little signs of changing after a hard Brexit. The gap between rhetoric and reality has given politicians the opportunity to indulge in populist promises. People sense they are not being told the whole truth – but do they want to hear it?
  • Just as political scientists had begun to take it for granted we had moved from an era of ‘position politics’ (the clash of big ideas between two tribes) to an era of ‘valence politics’ (where competence and credibility counts most)
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    Valence politics
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Do You and Your Partner Fight Too Much, or Not Enough? Turns Out There's a "Magic Ratio... - 0 views

  • Everyone knows couples break up when they fight too much. But what if they don't fight enough?
  • the “magic ratio” of positive and negative interactions in successful relationships is about 5 to 1.
  • So, too much fighting leads to breakups. That’s obvious. But what’s interesting about the theory is it implies that one sign of a doomed relationship could be not enough negativity.
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  • The idea is that because people and environments are always changing, partners must provide one another with enough corrective feedback so they can be “on the same page.” 
  • Gottman and his colleagues found that couples who remained stoic during conflicts actually tended to fare worse than couples that were more “volatile".
  • These couples exert a healthy amount of influence on one another, both positively and negatively. But as long as their interactions favor the positive, they tend to enjoy relatively stable relationships over the long term.
  • The 5:1 ratio also seems to ring true in the business world.
  • The results showed that the most successful teams made an average of 5.6 positive comments per every negative one, while the average ratio among the lowest performing teams was just 0.36 to 1.
  • Negative feedback can prevent you from driving off a cliff.
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    I find it very interesting that sometimes having some negative things can result in a positive way. In TV series or books, we can always see a scene that when two people are arguing, there would be a third person saying that "wow, you guys have such a good relationship!" and they would reply "no" together. Bow there are research on that and we can see from the perspective of logic of evolution that human community needs correction and advices from others to adjust themselves. I think arguing may sometimes shorten the relationship between two people since they both show each other the worst side and there won't be much hide between them. --Sissi (4/26/2017)
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How scientists fool themselves - and how they can stop : Nature News & Comment - 1 views

  • In 2013, five years after he co-authored a paper showing that Democratic candidates in the United States could get more votes by moving slightly to the right on economic policy1, Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University in New York City, was chagrined to learn of an error in the data analysis. In trying to replicate the work, an undergraduate student named Yang Yang Hu had discovered that Gelman had got the sign wrong on one of the variables.
  • Gelman immediately published a three-sentence correction, declaring that everything in the paper's crucial section should be considered wrong until proved otherwise.
  • Reflecting today on how it happened, Gelman traces his error back to the natural fallibility of the human brain: “The results seemed perfectly reasonable,” he says. “Lots of times with these kinds of coding errors you get results that are just ridiculous. So you know something's got to be wrong and you go back and search until you find the problem. If nothing seems wrong, it's easier to miss it.”
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  • This is the big problem in science that no one is talking about: even an honest person is a master of self-deception. Our brains evolved long ago on the African savannah, where jumping to plausible conclusions about the location of ripe fruit or the presence of a predator was a matter of survival. But a smart strategy for evading lions does not necessarily translate well to a modern laboratory, where tenure may be riding on the analysis of terabytes of multidimensional data. In today's environment, our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a result or to accept 'reasonable' outcomes without question — that is, to ceaselessly lead ourselves astray without realizing it.
  • Failure to understand our own biases has helped to create a crisis of confidence about the reproducibility of published results
  • Although it is impossible to document how often researchers fool themselves in data analysis, says Ioannidis, findings of irreproducibility beg for an explanation. The study of 100 psychology papers is a case in point: if one assumes that the vast majority of the original researchers were honest and diligent, then a large proportion of the problems can be explained only by unconscious biases. “This is a great time for research on research,” he says. “The massive growth of science allows for a massive number of results, and a massive number of errors and biases to study. So there's good reason to hope we can find better ways to deal with these problems.”
  • Although the human brain and its cognitive biases have been the same for as long as we have been doing science, some important things have changed, says psychologist Brian Nosek, executive director of the non-profit Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, which works to increase the transparency and reproducibility of scientific research. Today's academic environment is more competitive than ever. There is an emphasis on piling up publications with statistically significant results — that is, with data relationships in which a commonly used measure of statistical certainty, the p-value, is 0.05 or less. “As a researcher, I'm not trying to produce misleading results,” says Nosek. “But I do have a stake in the outcome.” And that gives the mind excellent motivation to find what it is primed to find.
  • Another reason for concern about cognitive bias is the advent of staggeringly large multivariate data sets, often harbouring only a faint signal in a sea of random noise. Statistical methods have barely caught up with such data, and our brain's methods are even worse, says Keith Baggerly, a statistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. As he told a conference on challenges in bioinformatics last September in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, “Our intuition when we start looking at 50, or hundreds of, variables sucks.”
  • One trap that awaits during the early stages of research is what might be called hypothesis myopia: investigators fixate on collecting evidence to support just one hypothesis; neglect to look for evidence against it; and fail to consider other explanations.
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How the Republicans Sold Your Privacy to Internet Providers - The New York Times - 0 views

  • the House quietly voted to undo rules that keep internet service providers — the companies like Comcast, Verizon and Charter that you pay for online access — from selling your personal information.
  • President Trump will be able to sign legislation that will strike a significant blow against online privacy protection.
  • The bill is an effort by the F.C.C.’s new Republican majority and congressional Republicans to overturn a simple but vitally important concept
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  • Reversing those protections is a dream for cable and telephone companies, which want to capitalize on the value of such personal information.
  • Apparently, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress value privacy for themselves over the privacy of the Americans who put them in office. What is good business for powerful cable and phone companies is just tough luck for the rest of us.
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    In today's class, we discussed how the parties now only have a shell and don't really serve as a safeguard of democracy. The parties become more like a entrance ticket to the election. Many people get in a parties not because the ideology appeals to them, but because by entering the party, it raise the chances and opportunity of winning an election. Now, money and power are played as stakes in politics and the general population is left to ignorance. Sometimes, I feel like the company are the real citizens who the government is serving, not the people. --Sissi (3/29/2017)
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A Homebody President Sits Out His Honeymoon Period - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Mr. Trump, who dislikes spending the night away from home and has been adapting to life at the White House, has rarely ventured far from the Executive Mansion or his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida during his first 85 days in office. He has not strayed west of the Mississippi River, appearing at public events in only seven states and eschewing trips overseas.
  • “Trump is going to his own drummer, as usual. It’s a risky strategy.”
  • “When you’re president, you don’t travel to get frequent flier miles — you travel to make a point,”
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  • focus on an ambitious domestic agenda, including the signing of executive orders and legislation to roll back Obama-era regulations.
  • his time is his most valuable asset.
  • What’s striking with President Trump is not only how contained his travel has been, but how much of it is around campaign rallies, rather than something he wants to get done
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    I think this comparison of Mr. Trump with other presidents might be a little biased. Every president has their own policies so I think it is not appropriate to compare the time they spend traveling. Since Mr. Trump's focus is on domestic policy so it is sort of reasonable for him to spend more time with in the United States. However, in the latter half of the article, the author talked about the quality of Mr. Trump's staying. Indeed, I agree with author that Mr. Trump's staying is not very efficient. I think the frequency of traveling shouldn't be the measure of their presidency, but the quality and efficiency of their action and decision should be weighted. --Sissi (4/17/2017)
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The trouble with atheists: a defence of faith | Books | The Guardian - 1 views

  • My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We're weird because we go to church.
  • This means as she gets older there'll be voices telling her what it means, getting louder and louder until by the time she's a teenager they'll be shouting right in her ear. It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we're too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we're savagely judgmental.
  • that's not the bad news. Those are the objections of people who care enough about religion to object to it. Or to rent a set of recreational objections from Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. As accusations, they may be a hodge-podge, but at least they assume there's a thing called religion which looms with enough definition and significance to be detested.
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  • the really painful message our daughter will receive is that we're embarrassing. For most people who aren't New Atheists, or old atheists, and have no passion invested in the subject, either negative or positive, believers aren't weird because we're wicked. We're weird because we're inexplicable; because, when there's no necessity for it that anyone sensible can see, we've committed ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes that obtrude, that stick out against the background of modern life, and not in some important or respectworthy or principled way, either.
  • Believers are people who try to insert Jee-zus into conversations at parties; who put themselves down, with writhings of unease, for perfectly normal human behaviour; who are constantly trying to create a solemn hush that invites a fart, a hiccup, a bit of subversion. Believers are people who, on the rare occasions when you have to listen to them, like at a funeral or a wedding, seize the opportunity to pour the liquidised content of a primary-school nativity play into your earhole, apparently not noticing that childhood is over.
  • What goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality.
  • to me, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.
  • The atheist bus says: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life."
  • the word that offends against realism here is "enjoy". I'm sorry – enjoy your life?
  • If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. And you'd think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus
  • The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure
  • What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place, that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn't and can't be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible.
  • But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove. I'd be an unrecognisable oddity if I did. Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe. We dream, hope, wonder, sorrow, rage, grieve, delight, surmise, joke, detest; we form such unprovable conjectures as novels or clarinet concertos; we imagine. And religion is just a part of that, in one sense. It's just one form of imagining, absolutely functional, absolutely human-normal. It would seem perverse, on the face of it, to propose that this one particular manifestation of imagining should be treated as outrageous, should be excised if (which is doubtful) we can manage it.
  • suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, you are povertystricken, or desperate for a job, or a drug addict, or social services have just taken away your child. The bus tells you that there's probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, and now the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it's true, is that anyone who isn't enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. What the bus says is: there's no help coming.
  • Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error.
  • A consolation you could believe in would be one that wasn't in danger of popping like a soap bubble on contact with the ordinary truths about us. A consolation you could trust would be one that acknowledged the difficult stuff rather than being in flight from it, and then found you grounds for hope in spite of it, or even because of it
  • The novelist Richard Powers has written that the Clarinet Concerto sounds the way mercy would sound, and that's exactly how I experienced it in 1997. Mercy, though, is one of those words that now requires definition. It does not only mean some tyrant's capacity to suspend a punishment he has himself inflicted. It can mean – and does mean in this case – getting something kind instead of the sensible consequences of an action, or as well as the sensible consequences of an action.
  • from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don't talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue.
  • I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don't have the feelings because I've assented to the ideas.
  • what I felt listening to Mozart in 1997 is not some wishy-washy metaphor for an idea I believe in, and it's not a front behind which the real business of belief is going on: it's the thing itself. My belief is made of, built up from, sustained by, emotions like that. That's what makes it real.
  • I think that Mozart, two centuries earlier, had succeeded in creating a beautiful and accurate report of an aspect of reality. I think that the reason reality is that way – that it is in some ultimate sense merciful as well as being a set of physical processes all running along on their own without hope of appeal, all the way up from quantum mechanics to the relative velocity of galaxies by way of "blundering, low and horridly cruel" biology (Darwin) – is that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. I think that love keeps it in being.
  • That's what I think. But it's all secondary. It all comes limping along behind my emotional assurance that there was mercy, and I felt it. And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me.
  • No, I can't prove it. I don't know that any of it is true. I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.)
  • let's be clear about the emotional logic of the bus's message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation
  • It's got itself established in our culture, relatively recently, that the emotions involved in religious belief must be different from the ones involved in all the other kinds of continuous imagining, hoping, dreaming, and so on, that humans do. These emotions must be alien, freakish, sad, embarrassing, humiliating, immature, pathetic. These emotions must be quite separate from commonsensical us. But they aren't
  • The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
  • It's just that the emotions in question are rarely talked about apart from their rationalisation into ideas. This is what I have tried to do in my new book, Unapologetic.
  • You can easily look up what Christians believe in. You can read any number of defences of Christian ideas. This, however, is a defence of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility, of their grown-up dignity.
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It's Win-Win When Trump and the Democrats Work Together - 0 views

  • The “punch a Nazi” thread that became popular earlier this year among the left-liberal journalistic class opened my eyes to this, as more than a few liberal thought leaders loved it when they saw a video of Richard Spencer being clocked by a masked thug.
  • How has political violence now become acceptable on lefty Twitter and among one in five college students? I’d argue that it’s too easy to overlook the influence of the neo-Marxist ideology now pervasive on countless campuses — specifically the late philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s concepts of “violence of defense” and “violence of aggression” in the context of what he called “repressive tolerance.” For parts of the New Left, racist democratic capitalism perpetuates so much systemic oppression that any defense of it or acquiescence in it amounts to violence against the victims. Therefore violence in defense of the victims is perfectly defensible. It just levels the playing field.
  • Hence it’s okay to punch a Nazi, but not okay to punch a communist. It’s defensible for an oppressed person of color to assault a white person but never the other way round. Hence a recent discussion in The Guardian about whether cold-cocking a racist is defensible: “A punch may be uncivil, but racism is worse.”
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  • Actually, speech is not just interchangeable with violence; even silence is! One of the more popular signs at the rally in Boston a few weeks back was the following: “White Silence = Violence.” If you are not actively speaking out against white supremacy, in other words, you are actively enforcing it. Once you’ve apologized for being born white, and asked permission to speak, your next and only step is to inveigh against racism/sexism, etc. … or be accused of being a white supremacist yourself. At some point your head begins to explode. What is this: a Maoist boot camp?
  • We often discuss these things in the media without understanding the core ideas that animate them. But it’s important to understand that for the social-justice left, there is nothing irrational about any of this. If you take their ideas seriously, oppressive speech is violence and self-defense is legitimate. Violence is therefore not some regrettable incident. Violence to achieve liberation is a key part of the ideology they believe in.
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The U.S. wants Costa Rica to host refugees before they cross the border. Here's why - 0 views

  • In July, the U.S. government announced a plan for Costa Rica to temporarily host up to 200 refugees from Central America while they are processed for placement in the U.S. or elsewhere.
  • The new scale and diversity of refugees is challenging tiny Costa Rica’s capacity to manage these populations and ensure protection of their human rights. The U.S. plan to send more refugees their way will only add to this challenge.
  • The plan for Costa Rica to temporarily house refugees is in addition to an existing program that helps Central American minors gain refugee status in the U.S.
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  • While the plan offers a short-term solution for protecting those most vulnerable to violence, it does not address the magnitude of the migration. In the first six months of the current fiscal year, the U.S. border patrol apprehended 120,700 people from the Northern Triangle countries attempting to enter the U.S. Some of those who cross the border will apply for asylum, but the majority will be sent back to their countries of origin and the violence they were fleeing.
  • Costa Rica is a major destination for migrants and refugees in the region, and immigrants account for 9 percent of the country’s population of 4.8 million. Like the United States, Costa Rica has seen a dramatic increase in arrivals of refugees from Northern Triangle countries, particularly El Salvador, since 2012
  • Central Americans moving to Costa Rica today often already have established social networks in Costa Rica –
  • Immigration officials expect to continue to see around 500 Colombian refugees arriving each year, despite the newly signed peace accord. Costa Rica has also seen a large increase in Venezuelans fleeing economic crisis.
  • Costa Rica has become a popular destination and transit country because of its relatively open borders and policies, its reputation as a champion of human rights and its relatively low levels of crime, violence and poverty. I
  • Over the past 10 years, the country has increased restrictions on immigration, hoping to discourage low-income economic migrants from Nicaragua from entering. These restrictions echo the national security logic of U.S. policies.
  • It neither addresses the underlying conditions of violence that refugees seek to escape nor strengthens regional governments’ abilities to deal with the arrival of these vulnerable populations.
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Amazon Walks a Political Tightrope in Its Union Fight - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It backs a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. It has pledged to meet all the goals of the Paris climate agreement on reducing emissions. It has met with the administration to discuss how to help with the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.
  • staying on the good side of Washington’s Democratic leaders while squashing an organizing effort that President Biden has signaled his support for.
  • Approval would be a first for Amazon workers in the United States and could energize the labor movement across the country.
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  • Labor leaders and liberal Democrats have seized on the union drive, saying it shows how Amazon is not as friendly to workers as the company says it is.
  • Lawmakers and regulators — not competitors — are some of its greatest threats, and it has spent significant time and money trying to keep the government away from its business.
  • I think the narrative is cooked now on their status as a monopoly, their status as an abusive employer and their status as one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C.”
  • we’ve been surprised by some of the negative things we’ve seen certain members say in the press and on social media,”
  • In February, Mr. Biden appeared in a video that didn’t mention Amazon explicitly but was seen as a clear sign of support to the union.
  • We really think we are an example of what a U.S. company should be doing for its employees.”
  • They have also attacked Mr. Bezos, the richest person in the world by some measures, for his personal wealth.
  • In the final quarter of last year, Amazon paid Jeff Ricchetti $60,000, according to disclosure forms he filed with the government.
  • He has deep relationships with Mr. Biden’s inner circle, and has played in a garage band with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
  • Amazon has promoted the $15-an-hour minimum in ads in publications frequently used to reach government officials, including Politico and The New York Times. Its lobbyists have pushed for a federal law raising the wage.
  • When professors at Georgetown and New York Universities asked Americans in 2018 which institutions they had the most confidence in, only the military ranked higher than Amazon
  • That absolutely includes the Amazon workers in Alabama, just like workers in Washington State and across our country.”
  • “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace to our constituents,”
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Half Of The Jury In The Chauvin Trial Is Nonwhite. That's Only Part Of The Story : Live... - 0 views

  • The jury chosen for the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, is notable because it is significantly less white than Minneapolis itself.
  • three Black men, one Black woman and two jurors who identify as multiracial.
  • 50% of the panel that will vote on Chauvin's fate will be Black or multiracial.
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  • Hennepin County, where the trial is being held, is only 17% Black or multiracial, while it is 74% white.
  • The jury's racial makeup will assuage some of the concerns that activists and others had expressed as jury selection got underway two weeks ago.
  • An insufficiently diverse jury, they believed, would undercut people's faith in the legitimacy of a trial seen as a critical moment in the racial justice movement that Floyd's killing helped reenergize last spring.
  • Two of the Black men on the jury are not African Americans but, rather, Black immigrants. During questioning, they expressed the kind of moderate views on policing and race relations
  • None of the Black jurors ultimately chosen for the panel spoke extensively about personal experiences with racism or about having had overtly negative interactions with police. Several said they had a healthy respect for law enforcement.
  • The fate of Juror 76 highlighted a tension that often exists in jury selection, especially in cases in which issues of race loom large. The experiences that come with being Black in America are often enough to get jurors struck from a case
  • That did not seem to be the case during jury selection for the Chauvin trial. Several jurors who expressed at least some support for the movement were seated on the jury — a sign of progress, Chakravarti said.
  • On one hand, that the defense would strike people with negative views of police is understandable, given Nelson's responsibility to seat a jury favorable to his client.
  • She said his fate was a reminder that the jury selection process should be reformed to ensure more African Americans have a fair shot to serve on juries."We should start," she wrote, "by recognizing that their lived experiences with racism are not justification to excuse them."
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U.S. Refugee Program Faces Challenges To Rebuild : NPR - 0 views

  • Among the more daunting challenges President Biden faces in the coming year will be to make good on his goal of admitting 10 times as many refugees — 125,000 — as former President Donald Trump allowed to enter the United States last year.
  • "One hundred and twenty-five thousand refugees being resettled this [next] year is unrealistic," says Krish O'Mara Vignarajah,
  • "Our refugee resettlement has been on life support for the past few years," Vignarajah says. Seventeen of her agency's 48 resettlement sites have closed due to budgetary cutbacks in the U.S. government's refugee program.
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  • "It involves reopening offices that were closed, rehiring staff we lost, and regaining crucial institutional knowledge," Vignarajah says. The staff members who were let go, she says, represented decades of experience.
  • "No back home again," Pathy says. "From the hospital, we leave and run away." At that point, they had no idea whether their daughters were alive or dead.
  • With other refugees, the Mulemas made their way to Ghana. The refugee camp there was administered by the United Nations. They spent five years living in miserable conditions, with little or no shelter.
  • In a sign of the interfaith character of refugee resettlement work, Jewish Family Services of Delaware partnered with a local Christian church, Calvary Baptist, to accommodate the Mulema family. Over the next three years, about a dozen volunteers from the church helped the Mulemas deal with the new challenges they faced.
  • Given how much work is necessary to resettle a single refugee family, however, the prospect of vastly and suddenly increased refugee admissions is barely feasible, in large part because the refugee resettlement infrastructure has been eroded over the past four years.
  • Trump allowed fewer than 12,000 refugees to enter the country last year, the lowest number in the history of the U.S. refugee program.
  • Across the United States, about one out of three resettlement sites have closed. Jewish Family Services of Delaware was informed it would not be assigned any more refugee families.
  • "The Trump Administration really did some serious damage to the infrastructure of the refugee program," Hetfield says. "Also, obviously, the pandemic put some really serious restrictions on."
  • A renewed government commitment to refugee admissions is not enough on its own to bring the program back to full strength.
  • The United States was founded as a nation of ideals, with almost a religious obligation to welcome the tired and homeless. The country has met the commitment before. It's now challenged to do so again, hard though it may be.
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Heat is a serious threat to dairy cows - we're finding innovative ways to keep them cool - 0 views

  • Severe overheating can threaten cows’ health and their ability to get pregnant and carry calves to term.
  • Dairy farmers use fans and sprayers to cool cows in their barns, but there is a substantial need for better options. Existing systems use a lot of energy and water, which is costly for farmers. And climate change is raising temperatures and stressing California’s water supplies.
  • Cows are particularly sensitive to hot weather: Their body temperature is 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit, three degrees higher than humans, and they create a large amount of heat as they break down feed in their stomachs and produce milk.
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  • These are all considered signs of heat stress. Once it sets in, cows will produce less milk. They may have trouble getting and staying pregnant, and in severe cases may die.
  • These strategies help cows regulate their body temperature, but use large quantities of water and electricity. The average California dairy farm spends US$140,000 annually on utilities. Furthermore, these systems may be insufficient during extreme heat waves.
  • Our first cooling technology uses mats buried approximately 4 inches underneath the sand bedding where cows lie down. Water flows through the mats and absorbs heat from the cows through conduction.
  • The second technology uses targeted direct evaporative cooling, sometimes referred to as a “swamp cooler,” and fabric ducts to blow cool air on the cows in the areas where cows eat and rest.
  • During our first test phase, we tested all four treatments on 32 cows at UC Davis and collected data on their respiration rates, body temperature, milk yield and behavior, as well as weather, water use and energy use. Data analysis is underway. We anticipate that we will identify at least one option that will cool cows as effectively as current options, but will also save water, energy or both.
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Climatologist Michael E Mann: 'Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes' ... - 0 views

  • the “inactivists”, as I call them, haven’t given up; they have simply shifted from hard denial to a new array of tactics that I describe in the book as the new climate war.
  • Who is the enemy in the new climate war?It is fossil fuel interests, climate change deniers, conservative media tycoons, working together with petrostate actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia. I call this the coalition of the unwilling.
  • Today Russia uses cyberware – bot armies and trolls – to get climate activists to fight one another and to seed arguments on social media. Russian trolls have attempted to undermine carbon pricing in Canada and Australia, and Russian fingerprints have been detected in the yellow-vest protests in France.
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  • I am optimistic about a favourable shift in the political wind. The youth climate movement has galvanised attention and re-centred the debate on intergenerational ethics. We are seeing a tipping point in public consciousness. That bodes well. There is still a viable way forward to avoid climate catastrophe.
  • You can see from the talking points of inactivists that they are really in retreat. Republican pollsters like Frank Luntz have advised clients in the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who carry water for them that you can’t get away with denying climate change any more.
  • Let’s dig into deniers’ tactics. One that you mention is deflection. What are the telltale signs?Any time you are told a problem is your fault because you are not behaving responsibly, there is a good chance that you are being deflected from systemic solutions and policies
  • Blaming the individual is a tried and trusted playbook that we have seen in the past with other industries. In the 1970s, Coca Cola and the beverage industry did this very effectively to convince us we don’t need regulations on waste disposal. Because of that we now have a global plastic crisis. The same tactics are evident in the gun lobby’s motto, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, which is classic deflection
  • look at BP, which gave us the world’s first individual carbon footprint calculator. Why did they do that? Because BP wanted us looking at our carbon footprint not theirs.
  • Of course lifestyle changes are necessary but they alone won’t get us where we need to be. They make us more healthy, save money and set a good example for others.
  • But we can’t allow the forces of inaction to convince us these actions alone are the solution and that we don’t need systemic changes
  • I don’t eat meat. We get power from renewable energy. I have a plug-in hybrid vehicle. I do those things and encourage others to do them. but i don’t think it is helpful to shame people people who are not as far along as you.
  • Instead, let’s help everybody to move in that direction. That is what policy and system change is about: creating incentives so even those who don’t think about their environmental footprint are still led in that direction.
  • Another new front in the new climate war is what you call “doomism”. What do you mean by that?Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement
  • They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair.
  • Many of the prominent doomist narratives – [Jonathan] Franzen, David Wallace-Wells, the Deep Adaptation movement – can be traced back to a false notion that an Arctic methane bomb will cause runaway warming and extinguish all life on earth within 10 years. This is completely wrong. There is no science to support that.
  • Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes. It can be enabling and empowering as long as you don’t get stuck there. It is up to others to help ensure that experience can be cathartic.
  • the entry of new participants. Bill Gates is perhaps the most prominent. His new book, How to Prevent a Climate Disaster, offers a systems analyst approach to the problem, a kind of operating system upgrade for the planet. What do you make of his take?I want to thank him for using his platform to raise awareness of the climate crisis
  • I disagree with him quite sharply on the prescription. His view is overly technocratic and premised on an underestimate of the role that renewable energy can play in decarbonising our civilisation
  • If you understate that potential, you are forced to make other risky choices, such as geoengineering and carbon capture and sequestration. Investment in those unproven options would crowd out investment in better solutions.
  • Gates writes that he doesn’t know the political solution to climate change. But the politics are the problem buddy. If you don’t have a prescription of how to solve that, then you don’t have a solution and perhaps your solution might be taking us down the wrong path.
  • What are the prospects for political change with Joe Biden in the White House?Breathtaking. Biden has surprised even the most ardent climate hawks in the boldness of his first 100 day agenda, which goes well beyond any previous president, including Obama when it comes to use of executive actions. He has incorporated climate policy into every single government agency and we have seen massive investments in renewable energy infrastructure, cuts in subsidies for fossil fuels, and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.
  • On the international front, the appointment of John Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris Accord, has telegraphed to the rest of the world that the US is back and ready to lead again
  • That is huge and puts pressure on intransigent state actors like [Australian prime minister] Scott Morrison, who has been a friend of the fossil fuel industry in Australia. Morrison has changed his rhetoric dramatically since Biden became president. I think that creates an opportunity like no other.
  • Have the prospects for that been helped or hindered by Covid?I see a perfect storm of climate opportunity. Terrible as the pandemic has been, this tragedy can also provide lessons, particularly on the importance of listening to the word of science when facing risks
  • Out of this crisis can come a collective reconsideration of our priorities. How to live sustainably on a finite planet with finite space, food and water. A year from now, memories and impacts of coronavirus will still feel painful, but the crisis itself will be in the rear-view mirror thanks to vaccines. What will loom larger will be the greater crisis we face – the climate crisis.
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Why Some People Lie in Therapy | TIME - 1 views

  • Lying is, for better or worse, a behavior humans take part in at some point in their lives. On average, Americans tell one to two lies a day, multiple studies have suggested. But it’s where some people are fibbing that might come as a surprise.
  • Laura is far from alone. In a comprehensive 2015 study published by the American Psychological Association book Secrets and Lies in Psychotherapy, 93% of respondents admitted they had lied during therapy at least once.
  • The 2015 study found 61% of participants cited embarrassment as the main reason for dishonesty with their therapist.
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  • Morin acknowledges many clients are scared of “getting in trouble” for what they confess in therapy. “They may worry that the therapist will terminate their sessions because they aren’t making progress or they may be concerned the therapist will somehow punish them,” she says.
  • “Sometimes people don’t really mean to lie, but they minimize their problems because they can’t quite accept them yet,” Morin says. “Someone with a substance abuse problem might insist she didn’t drink much this week even though she drank heavily every day. Individuals often need help coming to terms with their problems before they can be honest with themselves.”
  • “I don’t want to talk about trauma because discussing it is going to overwhelm me,” Farber says of this mindset. “It’s going to bring me back to an experience or experiences that have been so difficult [and] so overwhelming, and I’m fearful that if I talk about it, it will re-traumatize me.”
  • Altering the truth in an attempt at kindness is still problematic, though, because it limits how effective treatment can be. “If you’re censoring your experience, then the therapist can’t be helpful to you,” Kolod says. Therapists are aware clients sometimes omit the truth or downplay the significance of certain life experiences, and there has been research on how mental health professionals can better spot dishonesty and adapt their treatment accordingly.
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Talking to Children About Anti-Asian Bias - The New York Times - 1 views

  • I’m Helping My Korean-American Daughter Embrace Her Identity to Counter Racism
  • “I’m not sure Asian-American families can avoid ‘the talk’ any longer,” one expert said.
  • My daughter was the only kid who didn’t have a separate Korean name when we signed her up for Korean classes three years ago. The blank space on the registration form looked at me, as if to say we’d forgotten something as parents.
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  • my spouse and I, who are both Asian-American, never thought to give her a name like Seohyun or Haeun. Though Korean was the language I spoke growing up in New York with my immigrant parents, I’ve forgotten many of the words I used to know. Yet hearing it spoken still conjures the sense of home.
  • I had no ambition to teach my daughter Korean, but when she turned 5, she insisted she wanted to learn so she could talk to her halmoni — her grandmother. So I conceded.
  • On Seollal, the Korean New Year, she and the other girls in her class sported traditional silk outfits. The floor-length skirts flapped to show their patterned leggings underneath, in a church basement that smelled of steamed rice and sesame oil.
  • Still, I kept asking my daughter when she would try soccer, which seemed to me the “American thing” to do on a Saturday morning. It was held at the same time as Korean School. I kept thinking about the parents on the sidelines and wondered what we were missing
  • A classmate had written that coronavirus was a problem and that keeping Chinese people out of the country was the solution.
  • In the summer of 2020, the Stop A.A.P.I. Hate Youth Campaign interviewed 990 Asian-American young adults across the United States about their experiences during the pandemic, and found that one in four had reported experiencing racism in some way
  • Kids said that they had been bullied, physically harassed and had racial slurs shouted at them
  • a child who hears a racist remark hears this: “You don’t belong. You’re other. You’re different.”
  • We are one of only a handful of Asian-American families in our school, which prides itself on teaching about inclusion. Earlier in the year, our daughter came home talking about Malala Yousafzai and Ruby Bridges, asking where we would have been sitting on the bus in times of segregation.
  • But when a girl in our neighborhood pointed to my daughter and said they could not play together because of the “China virus,” I wept.
  • During lockdown, we devoured books with Asian-American heroines by authors like Grace Lin and Min Jin Lee
  • I struggled to find the words to explain to my daughter why Chinese-Americans were forced to live in these barracks; why they were separated from their families.
  • She doesn’t yet know about the 84-year old man who died two days after being shoved to the sidewalk in Chinatown in San Francisco last month, or about the six Asian-American women killed by a shooter in Atlanta this week.
  • While attacks on Asian people aren’t always charged as hate crimes, many Asians feel an increasing sense of vulnerability.
  • Kids begin to develop a sense of racial identity by age 3 or 4, Dr. Yip said.
  • Once they enter grade school, they hear about race and racism from peers and the media they consume.
  • “By not talking about race” and what they’re hearing, Dr. Yip said, “you run the risk of intensifying stereotypes” which can then lead to racism.
  • “We think we’re protecting our kids, by not talking about racist incidents” Dr. Chen added. “But actually not talking about it is not helping.” Building their racial identity is what helps them feel safe.
  • When a racist incident happens to your child, Dr. Chen said, don’t jump into solving the problem. First ask how they feel and listen. Tell them you don’t know all the answers, but you can find solutions together.
  • Make sure that the children who were targeted know it wasn’t their fault, Dr. Chen added. Role play what you will do if it happens again and tell them, Mom or Dad or your caregivers will keep you safe.
  • “I’m not sure Asian-American families can avoid ‘the talk’ any longer.” It’s a talk that must include listening to, and coming to understand, all groups who face racial bias.
  • In hindsight, I now see that Korean School has done more for my family than soccer ever could. It’s a place where my daughter sees she isn’t alone. There are families who look like ours and wrestle with the same questions, about what we will forget, and what we will keep from our immigrant families’ pasts.
  • My daughter has gone from sewing masks for her bears, to carrying Black Lives Matter posters and voting with me in a presidential election.
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Who gets Cherokee citizenship has long been a struggle between the tribe and the US gov... - 1 views

  • A recent decision by the Cherokee Nation’s Supreme Court struck down a law that freedmen – descendants of people enslaved by Cherokees in the 18th and 19th centuries – cannot hold elective tribal office.
  • This decision means that the 8,500 tribal descendants of Cherokee freedmen can run for tribal office. Freedmen currently have access to voting and other benefits of citizenship that were not a part of this particular decision.
  • The Cherokee Nation has wrestled with the tribal citizenship status of freedmen since U.S. officials forced Cherokees to adopt freedmen into the tribe in 1866.
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  • Historically, U.S. officials, often encouraged by public opinion, have wanted Cherokees to adopt U.S. legal and cultural practices. When not attempting to terminate the tribe, U.S. officials have sided with freedmen whenever tribal citizenship disputes reach U.S. courts. U.S. politicians have also repeatedly threatened to withhold federal money should the Cherokee Nation not grant freedmen citizenship.
  • Colonists, later U.S. citizens, wanted to acquire Cherokee land and to make Cherokees more like whites in terms of their religious, government and economic practices. That meant that Cherokees would have to abandon their practice of holding land communally, which made land difficult for U.S. settlers to acquire because they could not deal with individuals.
  • After the war, the U.S. forced the Cherokee Nation to sign the Treaty of 1866. The tribe’s 1839 Constitution, affirming previous laws, had stated that Cherokee citizens must be descended from Cherokees, not their Black slaves. But in this peace treaty, Cherokees agreed to make their former slaves full tribal citizens.
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JAMA Editor Placed on Leave After Deputy's Comments on Racism - The New York Times - 0 views

  • JAMA Editor Placed on Leave After Deputy’s Comments on Racism
  • After a staff member dismissed racism as a problem in medicine on a podcast, a petition signed by thousands demanded a review of editorial processes at the journal.
  • Following controversial comments on racism in medicine made by a deputy editor at JAMA, the editor in chief of the prominent medical journal was placed on administrative leave on Thursday.
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  • “Structural racism is an unfortunate term,” said Dr. Livingston, who is white. “Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help
  • Many people like myself are offended by the implication that we are somehow racist.”
  • The podcast was promoted with a tweet from the journal that said, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?”
  • The response to both was swift and angry, prompting the journal to take down the podcast and delete the tweet.
  • Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA,
  • The A.M.A.’s email to employees promised that the investigation would probe “
  • “We are instituting changes that will address and prevent such failures from happening again.”
  • “It’s not just that this podcast is problematic — it’s that there is a long and documented history of institutional racism at JAMA,”
  • “That podcast should never have happened,”
  • The fact that podcast was conceived of, recorded and posted was unconscionable.”
  • “I think it caused an incalculable amount of pain and trauma to Black physicians and patients,” she said. “And I think it’s going to take a long time for the journal to heal that pain.
  • “staff and leadership are overwhelmingly white and economically privileged,” and he committed to reviewing its editorial process.
  • Dr. Livingston later resigned.
  • how the podcast and associated tweet were developed, reviewed, and ultimately published,” and said that the association had engaged independent investigators to ensure objectivity.
  • The email did not offer a date for conclusion of the investigation.
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Opinion | Trump May Start a Social Network. Here's My Advice. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Trump May Start a Social Network. Here’s My Advice.
  • Recast your past failures as successes, engage in meaningless optics, and other tips from the Silicon Valley playbook.
  • So Donald Trump wants to start a social network and become a tech mogul?
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  • I am an expert in all things digital, and I’m willing to help.
  • Tech is hard stuff, and new ventures should be attempted with extreme care, especially by those whose history of entrepreneurship is littered with the carcasses of, say, Trump Steaks.
  • Or Trump Water. Or Trump University. Or Trump magazine. Or Trump Casinos. Or Trump Mortgages. Or Trump Airlines. Or Trump Vodka. Or the Trump pandemic response. Or, of course, the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.
  • So, Mr. Trump, here’s my advice.
  • I advise you to embrace your myriad failures as if they’re your best friends.
  • Even if “fail” and “don’t work” are the same thing, in tech these are seen as a badge of honor rather than as a sign that you are terrible at executing a business plan and engage in only meaningless optics.
  • Engage in meaningless optics.
  • uckily, this fits right in your wheelhouse — a talent that you have displayed in spades since the beginnings of your career.
  • “genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” I might rephrase that for your entry into tech by saying, genius is 1 percent instigation and 99 percent perfidy.
  • Instigation and perfidy, in fact, make the perfect formula for a modern-day social network, so you are already well on your way, given your skill set.
  • Baseless conspiracies? Check
  • Crazy ALL-CAP declarations designed to foment anger? Check.
  • Incessant lies? Check.
  • Self-aggrandizing though badly spelled streams that actually reveal a profound lack of self-esteem? Check.
  • Link-baiting hateful memes? Double check.
  • Inciting violence over election fraud with both explicit and cryptic messages to your base, in order to get them to think they should attack the Capitol, like, for real? Checkmate
  • hate-tweet at you, and, of course, all the fake media
  • You didn’t start the fire — well, maybe you did — but you definitely need to keep stoking it.
  • A social network requires a lot of it, including servers, apps and content moderation tools. You’ll need a whole army of geeks whom you’ll have to pay real money.
  • As for your future competitors … Twitter has seen its shares rise sharply since it tossed you off for life.
  • You still might get a reprieve over at Facebook, where an oversight board is contemplating your fate. We’ll see what the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, decides after the board makes a ruling.
  • Keep in mind, Mr. Zuckerberg really is the most powerful man in the world; that was even the case when you were in the Oval Office.
  • And while he once bear-hugged your administration, he is now sidling up to President Biden.
  • Avoid MeinSpace and InstaGraft, for obvious reasons. The narcissist in you might go for The_Donald, which you might now be able to use, since Reddit banned the 800,000-member forum with that name for violating its rules against harassment, hate speech, content manipulation and more.
  • (Sounds like just the kind of folks you like and who like you.)
  • Trumpets are brash and loud, and they’re often badly played and tinny. Right on brand, I’d say.
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Pandemic Social Life, One Year In - The New York Times - 0 views

  • One Year Together, Apart
  • The pandemic redefined relationships and self-reliance.
  • In the year since the pandemic began, people learned to be together while apart and navigated the pain of feeling apart while together
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  • Screens, small and large, became crucial links to the rest of the world.
  • In doing so, they rediscovered each other, and experienced the joys of bonding and the suffocation of constant proximity.
  • In some instances, these revelations were not happy ones: lawyers and mediators saw a spike in clients looking to divorce as soon as courts reopened.
  • Engagements and pregnancy announcements seemed to pop up constantly on social media. And there were plenty of weddings.
  • Couples in quarantine learned a lot about their significant others.
  • Inside nursing homes, Covid-19 outbreaks became all too regular, with more than 163,000 residents and workers dying of the virus.
  • In one study, almost one-third of the teens interviewed said they had felt unhappy or depressed.
  • Parents, especially mothers, left the work force quickly and in large numbers in the spring.
  • Those who continued working had to balance the demands of their jobs with domestic chores, child care and online schooling, putting strain on their mental health.
  • Retirees put off plans that had been years in the making, like travel and volunteer work.
  • Young people around the world, cut off from their usual social lives, faced a “mental health pandemic.”
  • Delivery drivers dealt with health risks, theft and assault.
  • Airline workers who weren’t furloughed had to confront passengers who refused to wear masks.
  • hospital staff around the country dealt with the gut-wrenching horrors of a steep surge in cases.
  • Doctors and nurses agonized over putting their families at risk, and dealt with intense burnout and pay cuts.
  • Some said that being characterized as heroes by the public left them little room to express vulnerability.
  • a toll higher than in any other country.
  • The world’s struggle to contain the coronavirus was often compared to a war
  • in this case, the enemy claimed more Americans than World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined
  • Grief and loss defined the last year
  • Funerals and final goodbyes took place over video calls, if at all.
  • a sign that people will soon be finding their way back to each other.
  • If you’re wondering what comes after, we are, too.Are you anxious that things will never be the same? Or are you fearful that we’ll return to “the same” much too quickly? Or maybe there is something seemingly small that you will cherish being able to do?
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Common Knowledge | Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning - 0 views

  • If you are familiar with the notion of “common knowledge” from earlier writing experiences, you may have noticed that its definition is easy to state, but can be hard to apply in a particular case. The “common” way to talk about common knowledge is to say that it is knowledge that most educated people know or can find out easily in an encyclopedia or dictionary. Thus, you might not know the date of the most recent meeting of the Federal Reserve, but you can find it out quite easily. Further, the term “common knowledge” carries the sense of “communal” knowledge—it is community information that no particular individual can fairly claim to own. One sign that something is community knowledge is that it is stated in 5 or more sources. So, if it’s known to educated people, or can be easily looked up, or appears in many sources, it is likely to be “common knowledge” and so does not need to be cited.
  • Because the notion of “common knowledge” is ambiguous and depends on context, you should always check with a professor or TF if you have any doubts. Some reference books will say “if in doubt, cite it,” but you don’t want to over-cite, so check with your readers to try to fix the line between common and specialized knowledge.
  • This advice about “common knowledge” is true for all disciplines—think about your audience and the course attitude, recognize when you’re writing as an expert, and always check with professors if you’re in doubt. The sciences, however, have a somewhat different notion of “common knowledge,” coming partly out of research practice and partly out of more collaborative work methods. Ideas, findings, and methodologies that are new knowledge (and therefore specialized rather than common knowledge) become old knowledge more quickly in the sciences. The answer, again, is to consider the messages you’re getting from the course about what concepts are common or foundational, and to check in with professors or TFs.
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