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Javier E

Texting Without Looking, on a New Touch Screen - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-on-a-new-touch-screen.html

student devices internet

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Researchers have created a prototype for a touch screen that can be used to send messages while it’s concealed in a jacket or pants pocket. The stealthy screen works when it is touched through the fabric, whether it is silk, cotton or even thick fleece. In classes or meetings of the future, with your hands tucked beneath the conference table or desk, you may rest a fingertip discreetly on the pocket that holds the touch screen and handle a call by tracing a message like “Running late. In a mtg.” on the fabric above the hidden screen. The touch screen will understand the message — it has a program to decipher handwriting, even of the scrawling sort. So while you’re writing on your pocket, you can maintain polite eye contact with the group, no longer betrayed by those telltale downward gazes necessary to text with a standard screen.
  • Javier E on 13 Feb 12
     
    What we have to look forward to.
hannahcarter11

House GOP fights back against mask, metal detector fines | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...inst-mask-metal-detector-fines

mask safety house gop vaccine

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • GOP lawmakers are doing everything they can to avoid paying fines for running afoul of rules imposed by Democrats that require masks and security screenings before entering the House chamber.
  • At least six Republicans have been fined in recent days for protesting the House floor mask requirement, adding to five others since February who were penalized for failing to complete security screenings.
  • Lawmakers can appeal the fines to the House Ethics Committee, which so far has upheld metal detector penalties against two Republicans and dropped two others against Rep. Hal RogersHarold (Hal) Dallas RogersHouse GOP fights back against mask, metal detector fines Sixth House member issued ,000 security screening fine House Ethics panel to drop K metal detector fines against Clyburn, Rogers MORE (R-Ky.) and House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.).
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  • he hefty monetary enforcements are yet another example of the distrust that has deepened since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Democrats say they can't count on certain Republicans to abide by safety measures, while GOP lawmakers argue the fines are an unnecessary power grab by the House majority.
  • The rules state that the fines will be deducted from the offending lawmaker’s salary and can’t be paid for with office budget or campaign funds
  • Mast further argued that the fine was unconstitutional and “unenforceable,” citing in part the Constitution’s 27th Amendment that prohibits any change in the salary of members of Congress from taking effect until after the next election.
  • While Mast, Miller-Meeks and Norman have all confirmed they are fully vaccinated, the other Republicans fined for going maskless have either declined to disclose their vaccination status or openly said they aren’t vaccinated.
  • The Capitol’s attending physician, Brian Monahan, explained in a memo that masks are still required in the House chamber unless members are recognized to speak during debate because it is “the only location where the entire Membership gathers periodically throughout the day in an interior space.” 
  • A recent CNN survey found that all Democrats in the House and Senate confirmed they are vaccinated.
  • Democrats also felt they had to impose fines to compel enforcement of security screenings enacted in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot after several Republicans refused to go through newly installed metal detectors outside the House chamber.
  • Democrats defending the penalties argue that rules enforcing metal detector screenings or masks enforce what they believe is ultimately a minor inconvenience.
Javier E

Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children - The New York Times - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...n-is-taking-a-toll-on-children

addiction screen tech children electronics

shared by Javier E on 06 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • “children have to know that life is fine off the screen. It’s interesting and good to be curious about other people, to learn how to listen. It teaches them social and emotional intelligence, which is critical for success in life.”
  • Children who are heavy users of electronics may become adept at multitasking, but they can lose the ability to focus on what is most important, a trait critical to the deep thought and problem solving needed for many jobs and other endeavors later in life.
  • An earlier Pew study found that teenagers send an average of 34 texts a night after they get into bed, adding to the sleep deprivation so common and harmful to them. And as Ms. Hatch pointed out, “as children have more of their communication through electronic media, and less of it face to face, they begin to feel more lonely and depressed.”
runlai_jiang

Is economic struggle driving North Korea to negotiating table? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-42631742

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Is economic struggle driving North Korea to negotiating table?
  • 1) Sanctions are beginning to biteExports of goods such as textiles, coal and seafood are the biggest contributors to North Korea's GDP. It's difficult to gauge just how much of an impact sanctions have had on the country's economy, simply because growth rates for the 2017 year have yet to be estimated. But exports may have declined by "as much as 30% last year", according to Byung-Yeon Kim, author of the book "Unveiling the North Korean Economy". In particular, exports to China -
  • 2) The economy is increasingly a priorityYou just have to read the text of Kim Jong Un's new year speech to see where his focus lies. The word "economy" is peppered through the speech, getting almost as much play as "nuclear". Image copyright Reuters Image caption Mr Kim offered the talks in his new year address Because North Korea can't make foreign currency through exports or foreign labour anymore, another potential source of hard currency is tourism.
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  • 3) Nuclear capabilities have been provenA series of successful missile tests have demonstrated the regime's ability to develop nuclear weapons, each one more seemingly more sophisticated than the last. And despite the bellicose rhetoric from the US and Donald Trump, North Korea has managed to consistently conduct its missile tests with no real retaliation or repercussions, barring sanctions. Image copyright EPA Image caption South Korea's President Moon wants more engagement with the North So in a sense, Kim Jong Un isn't losing anything by negotiating with South Korea.
  • In summary...Let's be realistic. Kim Jong Un isn't desperate yet. Sanctions and a weaker economy aren't going to have the regime discarding its nuclear goals. And there are still plenty of ways for it to make money, including via the latest asset class to hit international markets - cryptocurrencies.But it IS possible to see why North Korea may be more inclined to head to the negotiating table - especially with South Korea which has already said it may consider removing some sanctions temporarily during next month's Winter Olympics.
Javier E

O'Hare, DFW coronavirus: 'Enhanced screening' bring delays, crowds to U.S. airports - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rope-travel-ban-airport-delays

pandemic screening airport

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • shortly after taking effect, the measures designed to prevent new infections in the United States created the exact conditions that facilitate the spread of the highly contagious virus, with throngs of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder in bottlenecks that lasted late into the night.
  • “AT THIS MOMENT, HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE ARRIVING FROM NUMEROUS COUNTRIES ARE JAMMED TOGETHER IN A SINGLE SERPENTINE LINE VAGUELY SAID TO BE ‘FOR SCREENING,’” read a tweet from Tracy Sefl, who wrote that she waited for several hours to be screened at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport
  • “Authorities are going to have to deal with the ramifications of the breakdown of whatever this system is supposed to be,” she wrote. “Not to mention needless exposure risks from containing thousands of passengers like this.”
Javier E

How Does Science Really Work? | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...how-does-science-really-work

science scientific method history research knowledge culture progress discovery

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Other theorists have explained science by charting a sweeping revolution in the human mind; inevitably, they’ve become mired in a long-running debate about how objective scientists really are
  • In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science
  • Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens’s rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That’s because it isn’t intellectual but procedural. “The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think,” he writes, “but on what arguments they can make in their official communications.”
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  • Like everybody else, scientists view questions through the lenses of taste, personality, affiliation, and experience
  • geologists had a professional obligation to take sides. Europeans, Strevens reports, tended to back Wegener, who was German, while scholars in the United States often preferred Simpson, who was American. Outsiders to the field were often more receptive to the concept of continental drift than established scientists, who considered its incompleteness a fatal flaw.
  • Strevens’s point isn’t that these scientists were doing anything wrong. If they had biases and perspectives, he writes, “that’s how human thinking works.”
  • Eddington’s observations were expected to either confirm or falsify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicted that the sun’s gravity would bend the path of light, subtly shifting the stellar pattern. For reasons having to do with weather and equipment, the evidence collected by Eddington—and by his colleague Frank Dyson, who had taken similar photographs in Sobral, Brazil—was inconclusive; some of their images were blurry, and so failed to resolve the matter definitively.
  • it was only natural for intelligent people who were free of the rule’s strictures to attempt a kind of holistic, systematic inquiry that was, in many ways, more demanding. It never occurred to them to ask if they might illuminate more collectively by thinking about less individually.
  • In the single-sphered, pre-scientific world, thinkers tended to inquire into everything at once. Often, they arrived at conclusions about nature that were fascinating, visionary, and wrong.
  • How Does Science Really Work?Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?By Joshua RothmanSeptember 28, 2020
Javier E

A Conservative Blueprint for Universal Healthcare | MedPage Today - 0 views

www.medpagetoday.com/...103677

universal health care conservative blueprint

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • In 1989, a policy analyst at a leading conservative Washington, D.C. think tank described a workable planopens in a new tab or window in which private insurers, just as in Germany, provide universal coverage. This plan would:Change the current tax treatment of health insurance (which largely benefits people with employer-based coverage at the expense of lower income Americans)Declare that families face the responsibility of having adequate insuranceOffer government assistance to families unable to afford health coverage on their ownReform the Medicare program
  • The middle planks of this conservative plan ultimately became the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Marketplacesopens in a new tab or window, where families could purchase health insurance in a new, nationally regulated market with financial subsidies to cover costs for those with incomes below 400% of the federal poverty level (about $92,120opens in a new tab or window for a family of three).
  • President Barack Obama signed the ACA into law 13 years ago today, transforming a patchwork system of individual health insurance markets into one that today could form a national framework for universal healthcare
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  • an "ACA for All" system would prevent government from operating health insurance while allowing it to regulate and finance health insurance for most Americans. The ACA for All would not be "socialized medicine" -- where government not only finances healthcare but supplies it through public hospitals, clinics, and the direct employment of clinicians. ACA for All would continue to rely on private industry (private doctors and private hospitals) and personal responsibility, and would limit the government's role in healthcare delivery.
  • A Republican plan for universal healthcare would offer those with non-employer-based coverage an adequately sized tax deduction, big enough to cover the cost of a family health insurance plan. And, for the first time since the 1940s, individuals would pay taxes on the value of employer-based health insurance above a certain threshold (based on the average costopens in a new tab or window of a family health insurance plan).
Javier E

Who's Afraid of Early Cancer Detection? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...on-grail-fda-approval-94f071a9

wsj health cancer detection test

shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer usually means a quick death—but not for Roger Royse, who was in Stage II of the disease when he got the bad news in July 2022. The five-year relative survival rate for late-stage metastatic pancreatic cancer is 3%—which means that patients are 3% as likely to live five years after their diagnosis as other cancer-free individuals. But if pancreatic cancer is caught before it has spread to other organs, the survival rate is 44%.
  • some public-health experts think that’s just as well. They fret that widespread use of multicancer early-detection tests would cause healthcare spending to explode. Those fears have snarled Galleri and similar tests in a web of red tape.
  • Early diagnosis is the best defense against most cancers,
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  • But only a handful of cancers—of the breast, lung, colon and cervix—have screening tests recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force
  • Many companies are developing blood tests that can detect cancer signals before symptoms occur, and Grail’s is the most advanced. A study found it can identify more than 50 types of cancer 52% of the time and the 12 deadliest cancers in Stages I through III 68% of the time.
  • There’s a hitch. The test costs $949 and isn’t covered by Medicare or most private insurance.
  • The trouble is that this cancer is almost never caught early. There’s no routine screening for it, and symptoms don’t develop until it is advanced. Mr. Royse, 64, had no idea he was sick until he took a blood test called Galleri, produced by the Menlo Park, Calif., startup Grail. He had surgery and chemotherapy and is now cancer-free.
  • Mr. Royse visited Grail’s website, which referred him to a telemedicine provider who ordered a test. Another telemedicine doctor walked him through his results, which showed a cancer signal likely emanating from the pancreas, gallbladder, stomach or esophagus.
  • An MRI revealed a suspicious mass on his pancreas, which a biopsy confirmed was cancerous. Mr. Royse had three months of chemotherapy, surgery and another three months of chemotherapy, which ended last February. Because pancreatic cancer often recurs, he gets CT and MRI scans every three months. In addition, he has signed up for startup Natera’s Signatera customized blood test, which checks DNA specific to the patient’s cancer and can signal its return before signs are visible on the scans
  • Grail’s test likewise looks for DNA shed by cancer cells, which is tagged by molecules called methyl groups that are specific to a cancer’s origin. Grail uses genetic sequencing and machine learning to recognize links between DNA methyl groups and particular cancers
  • The test “is based on how much DNA is being shed by tumor,” Grail’s president, Josh Ofman, says. “Some tumors shed a lot of DNA. Some shed almost none.
  • ut slow-growing tumors typically aren’t shedding a lot of DNA.” That reduces the probability that Grail’s test will identify indolent cancers that pose no immediate danger.
  • Grail’s test has a roughly 0.5% false-positive rate, meaning 1 in 200 patients who don’t have cancer will get a positive signal
  • Its positive predictive value is 43%, so that of every 100 patients with a positive signal, 43 actually have cancer
  • the legislation’s price tag could reduce political support. According to one private company’s estimate, the test could cost the government $39 billion to $145 billion over a decade. Mr. Goldman counters that analysts usually overestimate the costs and underestimate the benefits of medical interventions.
  • Because Grail uses machine learning to detect DNA-methylation cancer linkages, the Grail test’s accuracy should improve as more tests and patient data are collected
  • regulators may balk at approving the test, and insurers at covering it, until it becomes cheaper and more reliable.
  • How would the FDA weigh the risk that a false positive on a test like Grail’s could require invasive follow-up testing against the dire but hard-to-quantify risk that a deadly cancer wouldn’t be caught until it’s much harder to treat? It’s unclear.
  • some experts urge the FDA to require large randomized controlled trials before approving blood cancer tests. “Multicancer screening would entail tremendous costs and potentially substantial harms,” H. Gilbert Welch and Tanujit Dey of Brigham and Women’s Hospital wrote
  • Dr. Welch and Mr. Dey also suggested that companies should be required to prove their tests reduce overall mortality, even though the FDA doesn’t require drugmakers to prove their products reduce deaths or extend life. Clinical trials for the mRNA Covid vaccines didn’t show they reduced deaths.
  • One alternative is to rely on real-world studies, which Grail is already doing. One study of patients 50 and older without signs of cancer showed that the test doubled the number of cancers detected.
  • One recurring problem he has seen: “Epidemiologists are always getting cancer wrong,” he says. “Epidemiologists a decade ago said U.S. overtreats cancers. Well, no, the EU undertreats cancer.”
  • A 2012 study that he co-authored found that the higher U.S. spending on cancer care relative to Europe between 1983 and 1999 resulted in significantly higher survival rates for American patients than for those in Europe
  • By his study’s calculation, U.S. spending on cancer treatments during that period resulted in $556 billion in net benefits owing to reduced mortality.
  • He expects Galleri and other multicancer early-detection tests to reduce deaths and produce public-health and economic benefits that exceed their monetary costs
  • Expanding access to multicancer early-detection tests could also help solve the chicken-and-egg problem of drug development. Because few patients are diagnosed at early stages of some cancers, it’s hard to develop treatments for them
  • the positive predictive value for some recommended cancer screenings is far lower. Fewer than 1 in 10 women with an abnormal finding on a mammogram are diagnosed with breast cancer.
  • Mr. Royse makes the same point with personal force. “I would be dead right now if not for multicancer early-detection testing,” Mr. Royse told an FDA advisory committee last fall. “The longer the FDA waits, the more people are going to die. It’s that simple.”
Javier E

Tech is killing childhood - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...tech_is_killing_childhood

youth media tech childhood development social moral

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • For all the good they can find there, other influences, from screen games and commercial pop-ups to YouTube, social media, and online erotica, introduce them to images and information they are not developmentally equipped to understand. The combination of their innate eagerness to mimic what’s cool, and the R- to X-rated quality of the cool they see, has collapsed childhood to the point that we see second-graders mimicking sexy teens and fourth-graders hanging out with online “friends” and gamers far older and more worldly. Life for six- to ten-year-olds has taken on a pseudosophisticated zeitgeist far beyond the normal developmental readiness of the age.
  • inwardly, many children experience a suffocating squeeze on developmental growth that is essential for these early school years.
  • At a developmental time when children need to be learning how to effectively interact directly, the tech-mediated environment is not an adequate substitute for the human one.
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  • No matter how fierce play may look on the playground or in the social scrimmage of the school day, the more grueling competition is the one your child faces each day to measure up in her peer group. At around age eight, children start to compare themselves to each other in more competitive ways.
  • media and much of life online introduce an adult context for a child’s self-assessment. The behaviors they see there that set the bar for cool, cute, bold, and daring come from the wrong age and life stage. The mix suddenly includes adolescents and adults, media coverage of fame-addled celebrities and jaded politicians, teen magazines, and Victoria’s Secret at the mall and in the mail.
  • As the inner critic grows, parents become indispensable as the voice of the inner ally, the voice that helps balance a child’
  • innermost sense of himself
  • Day by day, kids need time to process their experiences intellectually and emotionally, to integrate new information with their existing body of knowledge and experience. They need time to consolidate it all so that it has meaning and relevance for them. Ideally, they do that with their parents and in the context of family and community.
  • Kids don’t get home from school anymore; they bring school—and an even larger online community—home with them.
  • t in the ways that matter most, speed derails the natural pace of development. Pressure to grow up faster or exposing children to content or influences beyond their developmental ken does not make them smarter or savvier sooner. Instead, it fast-forwards them past critical steps in the developmental process.
  • Developmentally, this is the time children need parents and teachers to help them learn to tame impulsivity—learning to wait their turn, not cut in line, not call out in a class discussion—and for developing the capacity to feel happy and alone, connected to oneself and empathetic toward others.
  • With nature pressing for human interaction and a child’s world of possibility expanding in the new school environment, to trade it all for screen time is a terrible waste of a child’s early school years.
  • Some things in life you just have to do in order to learn, and do a lot of to grow adept at it. Like learning to ride a bike, developing these inner qualities of character and contemplation calls for real-life practice. In the absence of that immersion-style learning, time on screens can undermine a child’s development of these important social skills and the capacity to feel empathy
  • Emotional and social development, like cognitive development, can benefit from “judicious use” of tech
  • “But if it is used in a nonjudicious fashion, it will shape the brain in what I think will actually be a negative way,”
  • “the problem is that judicious thinking is among the frontal-lobe skills that are still developing way past the teenage years. In the meantime, the pull of technology is capturing kids at an ever earlier age, when they are not generally able to step back and decide what’s appropriate or necessary, or how much is too much.”
  • in school, they take their cues from the crowd-sourced conversations they hear among friends and on social media. For girls, even seven-year-olds on the school playground, sexy is the new cute. Thin is still in, but for ever younger girls. In a study of the effects of media images on gender perceptions, one study reported that by age three, children view fatness negatively, and free online computer games for girls trend toward fashion, beauty, and dress-up games, reinforcing messages that your body is your most important asset.
  • prior to Britney Spears, most girls had ten years of running around, riding their bikes, and experiencing their bodies as a source of energy, movement, confidence, and skills. That was before children’s fashions included thong panties for kindergarten girls, stylish bras for girls not much older, lipstick or lip gloss as a top accessory for nearly half of six-to nine-year- old girls, and “Future Pimp” T-shirts for schoolboys.
  • Boys, too, are under pressure. They must measure up to the super-masculine ideal of the day, portrayed and defined by more graphic, sadistic, and sexual violence than the superheroes of yesterday. Homophobia and the slurs used to express it remain a common part of boy culture, but now at an earlier age, as does a derogatory view of all things female and an increasingly sexualized attitude toward girls.
  • Children do best when they are free and flexible to try on and cross over the gender codes—girls who skateboard and play ice hockey, boys who draw or dance, boys and girls who enjoy each other without “dating” overtones.
  • TV viewing helped white boys feel better about themselves, and left white girls, black girls, and black boys feeling worse. White boys saw male media comparisons as having it good: “positions of power, prestigious jobs, high education, glamorous houses, a beautiful wife” all easily attained, as if prepackaged. Girls and women saw female media comparisons in more simplistic and limited roles, “focused on the success they have because of how they look, not what they do, what they think or how they got there.” Black boys also saw their media comparisons in the negative, limited roles of “criminals, hoodlums and buffoons, with no other future options.”
  • there is “a clear link between media violence exposure and aggression” as well as to other damaging consequences including eating disorders, poor body image, and unhealthy practices in an effort to achieve idealized appearances. “Failure to live up to the specific media stereotypes for one’s sex is a blow to a person’s sense of social desirability,”
katyshannon

House Approves Tougher Refugee Screening, Defying Veto Threat - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...house-refugees-syria-iraq.html

house refugee screening threat new york times politics history US policy

shared by katyshannon on 20 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The House voted overwhelmingly Thursday to drastically tighten screening procedures on refugees from Syria, seizing on the creeping fear stemming from the Paris attacks and threatening to undermine President Obama’s Middle East policy.
  • The bill, which passed, 289 to 137, with nearly 50 Democrats supporting it, would require that the director of the F.B.I., the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence confirm that each applicant from Syria and Iraq poses no threat. The bill’s fate is uncertain in the Senate.
  • The sweeping majority of the House vote was a rejection of Mr. Obama’s moral appeal on the issue and the most vivid manifestation of the rapidly shifting politics within the United States, where Americans are at once war weary yet also frightened by the threats made by the Islamic State. More than two dozen governors, including one Democrat, have said they would try to block Syrian refugees from entering their state, and a recent Bloomberg poll shows that more than half of the nation agrees with them.
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  • The House action also served as another blow to Mr. Obama on an area that has repeatedly bedeviled him over the last two years of his presidency — how to articulate and put in place a policy in Syria, where there are no clear paths or partners to end the conflict.The fact that lawmakers in both parties have refused Mr. Obama’s request for an explicit authorization of force against the Islamic State, even as they vote to curb refugees, further highlights the vexing politics in the era of terror.
Javier E

Why Won't Blackface Go Away? It's Part of America's Troubled Cultural Legacy - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...face-american-pop-culture.html

racism stereotypes history culture

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • the persistence of blackface is unsurprising. It has been a part of American popular culture since what we recognize as popular culture emerged — roughly round 1832, when Thomas Dartmouth Rice, in blackface, performed his song “Jump Jim Crow” to thunderous applause at the Bowery Theatre in New York.
  • minstrel shows and blackface performances, both reinforced and popularized the “stereotype of the dimwitted slave who was happy to be in the South.”
  • For showbusiness impresarios, there was money to be made in perpetuating such stereotypes.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • A partial list of people who have appeared in blackface on screen and stage in the 186 years since Rice’s performance on the Bowery includes: Desi Arnaz, Fred Astaire, Dan Aykroyd, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (from “Amos ‘n’ Andy”), Ethel Barrymore, Milton Berle, Jimmy Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby, Billy Crystal, Ted Danson, Marion Davies, Robert Downey Jr., Judy Garland, Alec Guinness, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Benny Hill, Bob Hope, Boris Karloff, Buster Keaton, Hedy Lamarr, Janet Leigh, Harold Lloyd, Sophia Loren, Myrna Loy, the Marx Brothers, David Niven, Laurence Olivier, Will Rogers, Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra, Grace Slick, Spencer Tracy, Shirley Temple, John Wayne, Mae West, Gene Wilder and the Three Stooges.
  • “Its longevity is because it’s been institutionalized into every aspect of American life,” Dr. Barnes said. “People have perpetuated blackface because we don’t teach minstrel history. If these people had ever been exposed to it in a safe classroom environment, they would know better.”
  • The popularity of blackface was at its height in the early 20th century and has waned sharply since the ’50s, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared. Rather, it has taken on different forms, perhaps more palatable to modern audiences.
  • If one were looking for a historical case study in celebrating blackface, well, one could proceed straight to the White House of Woodrow Wilson
  • President Wilson showed the movie at the White House; it may have been the first movie ever screened there. “It is like writing history with lightning,” Wilson was quoted as saying about the film. “And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
  • blackface was such an ingrained part of popular American culture — enacted so widely across entertainment media — that it had passed from the stage and screen to everyday life for many. A joke that could be made, a costume that could be worn.
  • As the 19th century wore on, the country swooned over minstrel and vaudeville productions, which often used burnt cork or shoe polish to darken performers’ faces. And over Al Jolson, in particular. It was around 1904 when Jolson, a Jewish man born in what is now Lithuania, began performing in blackface.
Javier E

'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth | Technology... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...tubes-algorithm-distorts-truth

algorithm disinformation russia election 2016 politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.
  • Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth
  • YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”
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  • Lately, it has also become one of the most controversial. The algorithm has been found to be promoting conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas mass shooting and incentivising, through recommendations, a thriving subculture that targets children with disturbing content
  • One YouTube creator who was banned from making advertising revenues from his strange videos – which featured his children receiving flu shots, removing earwax, and crying over dead pets – told a reporter he had only been responding to the demands of Google’s algorithm. “That’s what got us out there and popular,” he said. “We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm.”
  • academics have speculated that YouTube’s algorithms may have been instrumental in fuelling disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. “YouTube is the most overlooked story of 2016,” Zeynep Tufekci, a widely respected sociologist and technology critic, tweeted back in October. “Its search and recommender algorithms are misinformation engines.”
  • Those are not easy questions to answer. Like all big tech companies, YouTube does not allow us to see the algorithms that shape our lives. They are secret formulas, proprietary software, and only select engineers are entrusted to work on the algorithm
  • Guillaume Chaslot, a 36-year-old French computer programmer with a PhD in artificial intelligence, was one of those engineers.
  • The experience led him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms are dangerously skewed.
  • Chaslot said none of his proposed fixes were taken up by his managers. “There are many ways YouTube can change its algorithms to suppress fake news and improve the quality and diversity of videos people see,” he says. “I tried to change YouTube from the inside but it didn’t work.”
  • Chaslot explains that the algorithm never stays the same. It is constantly changing the weight it gives to different signals: the viewing patterns of a user, for example, or the length of time a video is watched before someone clicks away.
  • The engineers he worked with were responsible for continuously experimenting with new formulas that would increase advertising revenues by extending the amount of time people watched videos. “Watch time was the priority,” he recalls. “Everything else was considered a distraction.”
  • Chaslot was fired by Google in 2013, ostensibly over performance issues. He insists he was let go after agitating for change within the company, using his personal time to team up with like-minded engineers to propose changes that could diversify the content people see.
  • He was especially worried about the distortions that might result from a simplistic focus on showing people videos they found irresistible, creating filter bubbles, for example, that only show people content that reinforces their existing view of the world.
  • “YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online,” he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimising for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy.”
  • YouTube told me that its recommendation system had evolved since Chaslot worked at the company and now “goes beyond optimising for watchtime”.
  • It did not say why Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, waited over a decade to make those changes
  • Chaslot believes such changes are mostly cosmetic, and have failed to fundamentally alter some disturbing biases that have evolved in the algorithm
  • It finds videos through a word search, selecting a “seed” video to begin with, and recording several layers of videos that YouTube recommends in the “up next” column. It does so with no viewing history, ensuring the videos being detected are YouTube’s generic recommendations, rather than videos personalised to a user. And it repeats the process thousands of times, accumulating layers of data about YouTube recommendations to build up a picture of the algorithm’s preferences.
  • Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial.
  • When his program found a seed video by searching the query “who is Michelle Obama?” and then followed the chain of “up next” suggestions, for example, most of the recommended videos said she “is a man”
  • He believes one of the most shocking examples was detected by his program in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. As he observed in a short, largely unnoticed blogpost published after Donald Trump was elected, the impact of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was not neutral during the presidential race: it was pushing videos that were, in the main, helpful to Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton.
  • “It was strange,” he explains to me. “Wherever you started, whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search, the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you in a pro-Trump direction.”
  • Trump won the electoral college as a result of 80,000 votes spread across three swing states. There were more than 150 million YouTube users in the US. The videos contained in Chaslot’s database of YouTube-recommended election videos were watched, in total, more than 3bn times before the vote in November 2016.
  • “Algorithms that shape the content we see can have a lot of impact, particularly on people who have not made up their mind,”
  • “Gentle, implicit, quiet nudging can over time edge us toward choices we might not have otherwise made.”
  • But what was most compelling was how often Chaslot’s software detected anti-Clinton conspiracy videos appearing “up next” beside other videos.
  • I spent weeks watching, sorting and categorising the trove of videos with Erin McCormick, an investigative reporter and expert in database analysis. From the start, we were stunned by how many extreme and conspiratorial videos had been recommended, and the fact that almost all of them appeared to be directed against Clinton.
  • “This research captured the apparent direction of YouTube’s political ecosystem,” he says. “That has not been done before.”
  • There were too many videos in the database for us to watch them all, so we focused on 1,000 of the top-recommended videos. We sifted through them one by one to determine whether the content was likely to have benefited Trump or Clinton. Just over a third of the videos were either unrelated to the election or contained content that was broadly neutral or even-handed. Of the remaining 643 videos, 551 were videos favouring Trump, while only only 92 favoured the Clinton campaign.
  • The sample we had looked at suggested Chaslot’s conclusion was correct: YouTube was six times more likely to recommend videos that aided Trump than his adversary.
  • The spokesperson added: “Our search and recommendation systems reflect what people search for, the number of videos available, and the videos people choose to watch on YouTube. That’s not a bias towards any particular candidate; that is a reflection of viewer interest.”
  • YouTube seemed to be saying that its algorithm was a neutral mirror of the desires of the people who use it – if we don’t like what it does, we have ourselves to blame. How does YouTube interpret “viewer interest” – and aren’t “the videos people choose to watch” influenced by what the company shows them?
  • Offered the choice, we may instinctively click on a video of a dead man in a Japanese forest, or a fake news clip claiming Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old. But are those in-the-moment impulses really a reflect of the content we want to be fed?
  • YouTube’s recommendation system has probably figured out that edgy and hateful content is engaging. “This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods,” she says. “So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed.”
  • Once that gets normalised, however, what is fractionally more edgy or bizarre becomes, Tufekci says, novel and interesting. “So the food gets higher and higher in sugar, fat and salt – natural human cravings – while the videos recommended and auto-played by YouTube get more and more bizarre or hateful.”
  • “This is important research because it seems to be the first systematic look into how YouTube may have been manipulated,” he says, raising the possibility that the algorithm was gamed as part of the same propaganda campaigns that flourished on Twitter and Facebook.
  • “We believe that the activity we found was limited because of various safeguards that we had in place in advance of the 2016 election, and the fact that Google’s products didn’t lend themselves to the kind of micro-targeting or viral dissemination that these actors seemed to prefer.”
  • Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, later wrote to the company about the algorithm, which he said seemed “particularly susceptible to foreign influence”. The senator demanded to know what the company was specifically doing to prevent a “malign incursion” of YouTube’s recommendation system. Walker, in his written reply, offered few specifics
  • Tristan Harris, a former Google insider turned tech whistleblower, likes to describe Facebook as a “living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election” that federal investigators have no access to. The same might be said of YouTube. About half the videos Chaslot’s program detected being recommended during the election have now vanished from YouTube – many of them taken down by their creators. Chaslot has always thought this suspicious. These were videos with titles such as “Must Watch!! Hillary Clinton tried to ban this video”, watched millions of times before they disappeared. “Why would someone take down a video that has been viewed millions of times?” he asks
  • I shared the entire database of 8,000 YouTube-recommended videos with John Kelly, the chief executive of the commercial analytics firm Graphika, which has been tracking political disinformation campaigns. He ran the list against his own database of Twitter accounts active during the election, and concluded many of the videos appeared to have been pushed by networks of Twitter sock puppets and bots controlled by pro-Trump digital consultants with “a presumably unsolicited assist” from Russia.
  • “I don’t have smoking-gun proof of who logged in to control those accounts,” he says. “But judging from the history of what we’ve seen those accounts doing before, and the characteristics of how they tweet and interconnect, they are assembled and controlled by someone – someone whose job was to elect Trump.”
  • After the Senate’s correspondence with Google over possible Russian interference with YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was made public last week, YouTube sent me a new statement. It emphasised changes it made in 2017 to discourage the recommendation system from promoting some types of problematic content. “We appreciate the Guardian’s work to shine a spotlight on this challenging issue,” it added. “We know there is more to do here and we’re looking forward to making more announcements in the months ahead.”
  • In the months leading up to the election, the Next News Network turned into a factory of anti-Clinton news and opinion, producing dozens of videos a day and reaching an audience comparable to that of MSNBC’s YouTube channel. Chaslot’s research indicated Franchi’s success could largely be credited to YouTube’s algorithms, which consistently amplified his videos to be played “up next”. YouTube had sharply dismissed Chaslot’s research.
  • I contacted Franchi to see who was right. He sent me screen grabs of the private data given to people who upload YouTube videos, including a breakdown of how their audiences found their clips. The largest source of traffic to the Bill Clinton rape video, which was viewed 2.4m times in the month leading up to the election, was YouTube recommendations.
  • The same was true of all but one of the videos Franchi sent me data for. A typical example was a Next News Network video entitled “WHOA! HILLARY THINKS CAMERA’S OFF… SENDS SHOCK MESSAGE TO TRUMP” in which Franchi, pointing to a tiny movement of Clinton’s lips during a TV debate, claims she says “fuck you” to her presidential rival. The data Franchi shared revealed in the month leading up to the election, 73% of the traffic to the video – amounting to 1.2m of its views – was due to YouTube recommendations. External traffic accounted for only 3% of the views.
  • many of the other creators of anti-Clinton videos I spoke to were amateur sleuths or part-time conspiracy theorists. Typically, they might receive a few hundred views on their videos, so they were shocked when their anti-Clinton videos started to receive millions of views, as if they were being pushed by an invisible force.
  • In every case, the largest source of traffic – the invisible force – came from the clips appearing in the “up next” column. William Ramsey, an occult investigator from southern California who made “Irrefutable Proof: Hillary Clinton Has a Seizure Disorder!”, shared screen grabs that showed the recommendation algorithm pushed his video even after YouTube had emailed him to say it violated its guidelines. Ramsey’s data showed the video was watched 2.4m times by US-based users before election day. “For a nobody like me, that’s a lot,” he says. “Enough to sway the election, right?”
  • Daniel Alexander Cannon, a conspiracy theorist from South Carolina, tells me: “Every video I put out about the Clintons, YouTube would push it through the roof.” His best-performing clip was a video titled “Hillary and Bill Clinton ‘The 10 Photos You Must See’”, essentially a slideshow of appalling (and seemingly doctored) images of the Clintons with voiceover in which Cannon speculates on their health. It has been seen 3.7m times on YouTube, and 2.9m of those views, Cannon said, came from “up next” recommendations.
  • his research also does something more important: revealing how thoroughly our lives are now mediated by artificial intelligence.
  • Less than a generation ago, the way voters viewed their politicians was largely shaped by tens of thousands of newspaper editors, journalists and TV executives. Today, the invisible codes behind the big technology platforms have become the new kingmakers.
  • They pluck from obscurity people like Dave Todeschini, a retired IBM engineer who, “let off steam” during the election by recording himself opining on Clinton’s supposed involvement in paedophilia, child sacrifice and cannibalism. “It was crazy, it was nuts,” he said of the avalanche of traffic to his YouTube channel, which by election day had more than 2m views
brickol

China, Desperate to Stop Coronavirus, Turns Neighbor Against Neighbor - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...avirus-wuhan-surveillance.html

crisis

shared by brickol on 04 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • These outcasts are from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, which is at the center of a rapidly spreading viral outbreak that has killed more than 420 people in China and sent fear rippling around the world. They are pariahs in China, among the millions unable to go home and feared as potential carriers of the mysterious coronavirus.
  • All across the country, despite China’s vast surveillance network with its facial recognition systems and high-end cameras that is increasingly used to track its 1.4 billion people, the government has turned to familiar authoritarian techniques — like setting up dragnets and asking neighbors to inform on one another — as it tries to contain the outbreak.
  • Local officials offered no explanation but returned a few days later to fasten police tape to his door and hang a sign that warned neighbors that a Wuhan returnee lived there. The sign included an informant hotline to call if anyone saw him or his family leave the apartment. Mr. Tang said he received about four calls a day from different local government departments.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • “In reality there’s not much empathy,” he said. “It’s not a caring tone they’re using. It’s a warning tone. I don’t feel very comfortable about it.”
  • China has a major incentive to track down potential carriers of the disease. The coronavirus outbreak has put parts of the country under lockdown, brought the world’s second-largest economy to a virtual standstill and erected walls between China and the rest of the world.
  • Still, even some government officials called for understanding as concerns about prejudice spread. Experts warned such marginalization of an already vulnerable group could prove counterproductive, further damaging public trust and sending those who should be screened and monitored deeper underground.
  • While networks of volunteers and Christian groups have been vocal about offering help, many local leaders have focused efforts on finding and isolating people from Hubei. On big screens and billboards, propaganda videos and posters warn people to stay inside, wear masks and wash hands.
  • In the northern province of Hebei, one county offered bounties of 1,000 yuan, or about $140, for each Wuhan person reported by residents. I
  • In the eastern province of Jiangsu, quarantine turned to imprisonment after authorities used metal poles to barricade shut the door of a family recently returned from Wuhan. To get food, the family relied on neighbors who lowered provisions with a rope down to their back balcony
  • “They’re only working to separate Wuhan people from Nanjing people,” Mr. Li said. “They don’t care at all if Wuhan people infect each other.”
  • Across the country, the response from local authorities often resembles the mass mobilizations of the Mao era rather than the technocratic, data-driven wizardry depicted in propaganda about China’s emerging surveillance state. They have also turned to techniques Beijing used to fight the outbreak of SARS, another deadly disease, in 2002 and 2003, when China was much less technologically sophisticated.
  • Checkpoints to screen people for fevers have popped up at tollbooths, at the front gates of apartment complexes and in hotels, grocery stores and train stations. Often those wielding the thermometer guns don’t hold them close enough to a person’s forehead, generating unusually low temperature readings. Such checks were worthless, for instance, against one man in the western province of Qinghai, whom police are investigating on suspicion that he covered up his symptoms to travel.
  • “I feel that the villagers are ignorant and the government isn’t helping; instead it’s leaking the information everywhere without telling them that I don’t have any symptoms,”
brookegoodman

Can the Houseparty app help us stay sane in quarantine? I downloaded it to find out | S... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ne-i-downloaded-it-to-find-out

crisis culture

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Last week, my friends and I were squeezed into a booth at Heyn’s, an ice cream shop in Iowa City. While the coronavirus was on everyone’s mind – we were liberally spritzing from my home-made bottle of hand sanitizer - hardcore social distancing had not descended upon the town yet.
  • “In!” we said, thoroughly sick of our own company. After a lot of back and forth about platforms, I suggested we download Houseparty.
  • Ready to get literally anything lit, I persuaded everyone to download the app and meet up in an hour. I brought out the wine, sent my new username out and waited. Slowly people started popping up on my phone screen. We broke into smiles and all started speaking at once. The audio immediately became a garbled mess.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Jeremy tapped a pair of dice on top of the screen, that launched a trivia game. We all tapped fast and furious on answers to questions like: what was the name of Cady’s high school in Mean Girls (Answer: North Shore.) There was a lot of yelling and laughter and then the game ended. I started thinking about dinner.
  • Seeing my friends via Houseparty didn’t feel normal – not by a long shot – but it did seem to lift, somewhat, the isolation I was feeling. That glass (or two) of wine felt much better when it was shared, even if just on a screen. My friends agreed. (Well, all except the one who doesn’t use soap.) The games were too easy, he thought.
rerobinson03

When Your Job Harms Your Mental Health - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...job-work-mental-health.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • But like the sports star, many of us have been stuck in situations that were detrimental to our mental health — at work or in our personal lives — feeling torn between societal expectations and self-preservation.
  • Her decision to avoid the press did not go over well with tennis officials. Ms. Osaka was fined $15,000, and the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments — the Australian, French and United States Opens, and Wimbledon — threatened to expel her from the French Open.
  • A survey of over 5,000 employees conducted last year by the advocacy group Mental Health America found that 83 percent of respondents felt emotionally drained from work and 71 percent strongly agreed that the workplace affects their mental health. While the respondents were not representative of the general population — they most likely found the survey when visiting the organization’s mental health screening tools — their responses show just how anxious some workers have become.
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  • Women and people of color may shoulder a disproportionate amount of emotional stress both in and outside of the workplace.
  • Women are at least twice as likely to have had depression as men, according to federal data. And Black people are less likely than non-Hispanic white people to receive treatment for depression or prescription medications for mental health
  • For example, you might notice that you dread starting work each day, or you feel so anxious that you have trouble thinking about everything that you’re supposed to do. Perhaps your emails are piling up and you aren’t communicating with people as much as you typically would. If you’re feeling ineffective in your job, you may also start to engage in more negative self-talk, like: “I’m no good at my job anyway. I’m useless,” Dr. Gold said.
  • Once you realize you need help, seek out a trusted friend, mentor, co-worker, peer group or therapist, said Inger Burnett-Zeigler, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who researches Black women’s mental health.
  • Remember that you are a worthy and valuable human being, separate from your job function, productivity and even how you might be evaluated by others,” Dr. Burnett-Zeigler said. “When feelings of self-doubt and not belonging show up, don’t lose sight of the unique talents and ideas that you bring to the workplace.”
  • It is illegal for an employer to discriminate against you simply because you have a mental health condition.
katherineharron

US coronavirus: America is at a crossroads in this pandemic as Covid-19 deaths near 500... - 0 views

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

covid

shared by katherineharron on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • On the brink of a devastating milestone -- 500,000 US Covid-19 deaths -- the US is at a crossroads in the course of this pandemic.
  • And while vaccinations slowly increase, some Americans say they won't get a Covid-19 vaccine -- hurting the chances of herd immunity and hindering a return to normal life.
  • More than 43.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of their two-dose vaccines, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. close dialogCovid-19Your local resource.Set your location and log in to find local resources and information on Covid-19 in your area.Please enter aboveSet Locationclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css from creative 50769 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-input {border-color: white !important;border-width: 1px !important;background-color: white !important;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12) !important;}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { color: #e53841 !important; font-size: 11px !important; position: absolute !important; bottom: -1.8em !important;} @media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext {font-size: 10px !important; }}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 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  • About 18.8 million have been fully vaccinated. That's about 5.7% of the US population -- far less than the estimated 70% to 85% of Americans who would need to be immune to reach herd immunity.
  • To speed up vaccinations, some experts have suggested delaying second vaccine doses to get more first doses into people's arms.
  • Both vaccines on the US market -- developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna -- require two doses, the second of which are intended to be administered 21 days and 28 days after the first, respectively.
  • Nationwide, the rates of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are declining.The number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has fallen for the 40th day in a row, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
  • Fauci hopes that doesn't happen, he said, adding it's "possible" people may be wearing masks in 2022.
  • And daily new cases have dropped 23% over the same time period, according to Johns Hopkins. (But testing is also down by 17%, according to the COVID Tracking Project.)
  • Daily deaths have declined 24% this past week compared to the previous week
  • Experts with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said over the weekend that while the B.1.1.7 strain likely accounts for less than 20% of current infections in the US, that number will likely soar to 80% by late April.
  • "Managing the epidemic in the next four months depends critically on scaling up vaccination, trying to increase the fraction of adults willing to be vaccinated above three-quarters, and strongly encouraging continued mask use and avoiding situations where transmission is likely, such as indoor dining, going to bars, or indoor gatherings with individuals outside the household," the team wrote.
  • "With new, more contagious variants of the virus circulating throughout the U.S., now is not the time to let your guard down and scale back on the measures that we know will work to prevent further illness and deaths -- wearing masks, practicing physical distancing, and washing hands," a joint statement said.
  • About 1,700 cases of variant strains first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • "I do think we're looking at some new normals. I think the handshake, for example, is probably going away," she said."I do think masks in the cough/cold/flu season in the winter months would make a lot of sense. That clearly, really insulated the Southeast Asian countries from some of the worst of this, understanding the importance of wearing masks."
  • "It's estimated that about 70% of Americans must be vaccinated before we get to herd immunity through vaccination," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "That's the point where enough people have the immune protection that the virus won't spread anymore."
  • "The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told Axios on HBO on Sunday.
  • "A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific and frankly, dangerous," he added. "And I think you can make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."
alexdeltufo

Trump v Republican elite - the split explained - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...election-us-2016-36232280

shared by alexdeltufo on 08 May 16 - No Cached
  • Trump isn't your typical conservative.
  • "I think what a lot of Republicans want to see is that we have a standard bearer that bears our standards." House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Thursday,
  • and the fact that his message has earned him millions of Republican votes suggests a fracture between the grassroots and leadership.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Both President Ronald Reagan and President George HW Bush extended amnesty to millions of undocumented workers while in office. Mainstream Republican figures such as Florida Senator Marco Rubio initially favoured similar immigration reforms that would have provided a "path to citizenship",
  • advocated deporting nearly 11 million undocumented workers
  • Almost all Republicans oppose abortion. In recent years, Republican-controlled state legislatures have supported a wave of regulations that have limited access to abortions - new laws that have been met with legal challenges.
  • Although the group is one of the leading abortion providers in the US, the health care organisation also provides cancer screenings, contraception and screening and treatment for sexual transmitted diseases.
  • This flexibility has convinced many social conservatives that Mr Trump cannot be trusted to appoint a Supreme Court justice who would oppose abortion rights.
  • any Republicans in the Congress currently support the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pending trade agreement between the US and many Pacific Rim countries.
  • Most Republicans oppose tariffs, saying they would spark a trade war that would damage the economy.
  • Republicans have long supported a muscular foreign policy and have not shied away from supporting the use of military force aboard. While generally opposed to government spending,
  • While Mr Trump has supported strengthening the military, he says he would do so by extracting concessions from allies.
  • A key faction of the Republican Party is made of fiscal conservatives who view the federal deficit as a major long-term problem for the country.
  • have long supported changes to Social Security and Medicare that would turn those programmes over to the private market.
  • Mr Trump has said he would not make cuts or changes to those programmes and instead he would bolster their funding sources by strengthening the US economy and reallocating some foreign aid to the coffers of Social Security and Medicare.
Javier E

Leave Your Laptops at the Door to My Classroom - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-door-to-my-classroom.html

learning laptop tech classroom focus listening notetaking

shared by Javier E on 02 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Laptops at best reduce education to the clackety-clack of transcribing lectures on shiny screens and, at worst, provide students with a constant escape from whatever is hard, challenging or uncomfortable about learning.
  • Lawyers can acquire hallmark precision only through repeated exercises of concentration. It does happen on occasion that a client loses millions of dollars over a misplaced comma or period.Once, a senior associate for whom I was working berated me for such a mistake and said, “Getting these things right is the easy part, and if you can’t get that right, what does it say about your ability to analyze the law properly?” I learned my lesson
  • Students need two skills to succeed as lawyers and as professionals: listening and communicating
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • We must listen with care, which requires patience, focus, eye contact and managing moments of ennui productively — perhaps by double-checking one’s notes instead of a friend’s latest Instagram. Multitasking and the mediation of screens kill empathy.
  • Likewise, we must communicate — in writing or in speech — with clarity and precision
  • The student who speaks in class learns to convey his or her points effectively because everyone else is listening.
  • education requires constant interaction in which professor and students are fully present for an exchange.
  • To restore the focus-training function of the classroom, I stopped allowing laptops in class early in my teaching career. Since then research has confirmed the wisdom of my choice.
  • Focus is crucial, and we do best when monotasking: Even disruptions of a few seconds can derail one’s train of thought
  • Students process information better when they take notes — they don’t just transcribe, as they do with laptops, but they think and record those thoughts. Laptops or tablets can undermine exam performance by 18 percent.
  • For all these reasons, starting with smaller classes, I banned laptops, and it improved the students’ engagement. With constant eye contact, I could see and feel when they understood me, and when they did not.
  • You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. My students need to learn how to be lawyers and professionals. To succeed they must internalize an ethos of caution, care and respect. To instill these values and skills in my students, I have no choice but to limit laptop use in the classroom.
sarahbalick

Euro 2016 football tournament in France could be terror target, US warns - BBC News - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-36416929

football tournament terror target

shared by sarahbalick on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • Euro 2016 football tournament in France could be terror target, US warns
  • The US has warned that the Euro 2016 football championship being held in France next month could be a target of militant attacks.
  • "The large number of tourists visiting Europe in the summer months will present greater targets for terrorists," the State Department said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In March, 32 people died in neighbouring Belgium when suicide blasts hit Brussels airport and a metro station. So-called Islamic State said it was behind both the Paris and Brussels attacks.
  • The attacks could hit tourist sites, restaurants, commercial centres and transportation, it warns, with large events such as Euro 2016 singled out. @media only screen and (min-width: 1px) { .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper { background-image: none; } .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper .ns_inner_wrapper { max-width: 100%; padding: 0; } } @media only screen and (min-width: 480px) { .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper .ns_inner_wrapper { max-width: 40%; padding: 0.5em; } .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper { background-image: url(http://news.files.bbci.co.uk/vj/live/idt-images/data_pic-Euro_2016_data/marseille_r13sr.jpg); } } .ie8 .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper .ns_inner_wrapper { max-width: 40%; padding: 0.5em; } .ie8 .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper { background-image: url(http://news.files.bbci.co.uk/vj/live/idt-images/data_pic-Euro_2016_data/marseille_r13sr.jpg); }
  • An unnamed US official told the Reuters news agency they had no particular threat information that gave rise to the latest alert.
  • More than 90,000 police, soldiers and private security agents are being deployed as well.
Javier E

Entertainment - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - Why Vimeo Is the Web Video Platform to... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...258450

video creativity social networks

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Vimeo continues to be the destination for content creators and viewers looking for cutting-edge videos, beautiful playback, and a remarkably positive community. A world away from cat virals, Vimeo is winning by nurturing the next generation of filmmakers (well, videomakers) and promoting their most innovative work.
  • now videomakers can get started, at least, by making good work and letting the Internet run with it.
  • . Vimeo Staff Picks, curated by Sam Morrill and Jason Sondhi, surfaces new videos of all kinds on a daily basis, and from there, many go viral. Within 24 hours of appearing on the channel, a video can receive tens of thousands views.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Especially in contrast to comments on YouTube, the conversations on Vimeo are unusually positive and constructive. This is thanks, in part, to Vimeo's role as a forum for low-budget filmmaking.
  • Since Canon released its 5D Mark II DSLR, a digital still camera with HD video, in 2008, the proliferation of inexpensive cameras has driven both an explosion in high-quality video content and a cottage industry around working with the cameras. Because DSLRs aren't optimal for video production, videomakers have had to figure out workarounds
  • video equipment is now good enough that it doesn't need to need to take center stage.
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