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Javier E

Barry Latzer on Why Crime Rises and Falls - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...487583

crime demographics culture law enforcement Policy

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Barry Latzer: The optimistic view is that the late ‘60s crime tsunami, which ended in the mid-1990s, was sui generis, and we are now in a period of "permanent peace," with low crime for the foreseeable future
  • Pessimists rely on the late Eric Monkkonen's cyclical theory of crime, which suggests that the successive weakening and strengthening of social controls on violence lead to a crime roller coaster. The current zeitgeist favors a weakening of social controls, including reductions in incarcerative sentences and restrictions on police, on the grounds that the criminal-justice system is too racist, unfair, and expensive. If Monkkonen were correct, we will get a crime rise before long.
  • the most provocative feature of your book: your belief that different cultural groups show different propensities for crime, enduring over time, and that these groups carry these propensities with them when they migrate from place to place.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • this idea and its implications stir more controversy among criminologists than any other. Would you state your position as precisely as possible in this brief space?
  • Latzer: First of all, culture and race, in the biological or genetic sense, are very different. Were it not for the racism of the 18th and 19th centuries, we might not have had a marked cultural difference between blacks and whites in the U.S. But history cannot be altered, only studied and sometimes deplored. 28 28
  • Different groups of people, insofar as they consider themselves separate from others, share various cultural characteristics: dietary, religious, linguistic, artistic, etc. They also share common beliefs and values. There is nothing terribly controversial about this. If it is mistaken then the entire fields of sociology and anthropology are built on mistaken premises.
  • With respect to violent crime, scholars are most interested in a group's preference for violence as a way of resolving interpersonal conflict. Some groups, traditionally rural, developed cultures of “honor”—strong sensitivities to personal insult. We see this among white and black southerners in the 19th century, and among southern Italian and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. in the early 20th century. These groups engaged in high levels of assaultive crimes in response to perceived slights, mainly victimizing their own kind.
  • This honor culture explains the high rates of violent crime among African Americans who, living amidst southern whites for over a century, incorporated those values. When blacks migrated north in the 20th century, they transported these rates of violence. Elijah Anderson's book, The Code of the Streets, describes the phenomenon, and Thomas Sowell, in Black Liberals and White Rednecks, helps explain it. 28 28
  • Theories of crime that point to poverty and racism have the advantage of explaining why low-income groups predominate when it comes to violent crime. What they really explain, though, is why more affluent groups refrain from such crime. And the answer is that middle-class people (regardless of race) stand to lose a great deal from such behavior.
  • Likewise, the lead removal theory. The same "lead-free" generation that engaged in less crime from 1993 on committed high rates of violent crime between 1987 and 1992.
  • Frum: Let’s flash forward to the present day. You make short work of most of the theories explaining the crime drop-off since the mid-1990s: the Freakonomics theory that attributes the crime decline to easier access to abortion after 1970; the theory that credits reductions in lead poisoning; and the theory that credits the mid-1990s economic spurt. Why are these ideas wrong? And what would you put in their place? 28 28
  • both the abortion and leaded-gasoline theories are mistaken because of a failure to explain the crime spike that immediately preceded the great downturn. Abortions became freely available starting in the 1970s, which is also when lead was removed from gasoline. Fast-forward 15 to 20 years to the period in which unwanted babies had been removed from the population and were not part of the late adolescent, early adult, cohort. This cohort was responsible for the huge spike in crime in the late 1980s, early 1990s, the crack cocaine crime rise. Why didn't the winnowing through abortion of this population reduce crime?
  • The cultural explanation for violence is superior to explanations that rest of poverty or racism, however, because it can account for the differentials in the violent-crime rates of groups with comparable adversities
  • As for economic booms, it is tempting to argue that they reduce crime on the theory that people who have jobs and higher incomes have less incentive to rob and steal. This is true. But violent crimes, such as murder and manslaughter, assault, and rape, are not motivated by pecuniary interests. They are motivated by arguments, often of a seemingly petty nature, desires for sexual conquest by violence in the case of rape, or domestic conflicts, none of which are related to general economic conditions
  • Rises in violent crime have much more to do with migrations of high-crime cultures, especially to locations in which governments, particularly crime-control agents, are weak.
  • Declines are more likely when crime controls are strong, and there are no migrations or demographic changes associated with crime rises
  • In short, the aging of the violent boomer generation followed by the sudden rise and demise of the crack epidemic best explains the crime trough that began in the mid-1990s and seems to be continuing even today.
  • Contrary to leftist claims, strengthened law enforcement played a major role in the crime decline. The strengthening was the result of criminal-justice policy changes demanded by the public, black and white, and was necessitated by the weakness of the criminal justice system in the late ‘60s
  • On the other hand, conservatives tend to rely too much on the strength of the criminal-justice system in explaining crime oscillations, which, as I said, have a great to do with migrations and demographics
  • The contemporary challenge is to keep law enforcement strong without alienating African Americans, an especially difficult proposition given the outsized violent-crime rates in low-income black communities.
  • Frum: The sad exception to the downward trend in crime since 1990 is the apparent increase in mass shootings
  • Should such attacks be included in our thinking about crime? If so, how should we think about them? 28 28
  • If we separate out the ideologically motivated mass killings, such as Orlando (apparently) and San Bernardino, then we have a different problem. Surveilling potential killers who share a violent ideology will be extremely difficult but worthwhile. Limiting the availability of rapid-fire weapons with high-capacity ammunition clips is also worth doing, but politically divisive.
  • of course, developments abroad will affect the number of incidents, as will the copycat effect in the immediate aftermath of an incident. This is a complex problem, different from ordinary killings, which, by the way, take many more lives.
nataliedepaulo1

John Kasich: Repealing Medicaid expansion is 'a very, very bad idea' - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

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

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 23 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Email<
  • Washington (CNN)Ohio Gov. John Kasich says he won't "sit silent" and watch the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion get "ripped out" as Republicans work to repeal the law.
  • Kasich said 700,000 Ohio residents now receive care who did not before Obamacare became law, including "a third of whom have mental illness and need to be treated or drug treatment, which is a problem throughout the country."
malonema1

Obama is staging a political comeback - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/ressional-redristicting-2017-2

us obama pol

shared by malonema1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Obama is staging a political comeback
  • Former President Barack Obama is staging his political re-debut, Politico&nbsp;reported&nbsp;on Tuesday.&nbsp;
  • Ultimately, the goal for Democrats is to fix what they see as a party disadvantage — congressional districts that are overwhelmingly dominated by one party. The concept is better known as "gerrymandering."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Holder said&nbsp;there will be a difficult legal battle ahead, calling Sessions' latest actions in Texas "disheartening" and adding that Democrats are gearing up to file lawsuits nationwide to challenge districting maps and get the party in a stronger position at the state level.
Javier E

Why Civics Class Should Be Sexy - Eric Liu - National - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...255858

education civics methods US

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • All young people want to understand how to be more powerful and effective, individually and in groups. Give them that understanding -- teach them power -- and they will be highly motivated to keep learning.
Javier E

Peak Intel: How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber - Eric Garland - International - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...255413

intelligence strategic planning management

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • the culture of intelligence has been in free-fall since the financial crisis of 2008. While people may be pretending to follow intelligence, impostors in both the analyst and executive camps actually follow shallow, fake processes that justify their existing decisions and past investments.
  • three trends are making this harder
  • the explosion of cheap capital from Wall Street has led major industries to consolidate. Where a sector such as pharmaceuticals or telecommunications (and, of course, banking) might have had dozens of big players a couple of decades ago, now it has closer to five. When I began in the intelligence industry 15 years ago, I did projects for Compaq, Amoco, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and Cingular -- all of which have since been rolled into the conglomerates of Hewlett Packard, British Petroleum, Pfizer, and AT&amp;T. There are fewer firms for an intelligence analyst to track, and their behavior has to be understood on totally different terms than when this discipline was created.
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  • One cannot predict the future of a marketplace by trend analysis alone, because oligopolies do not compete the same way as do firms in free markets.&nbsp;
  • industry consolidations have created gigantic bureaucracies. Hierarchical organizations have a very different logic than smaller firms. In less consolidated industries, success and failure are largely the result of the decisions you make, so intelligence about the reality of the marketplace is critical. Life is different in gigantic organizations, where success and failure are almost impossible to attribute to individual decisions.
  • In large, slow-moving bureaucracies, conventional thinking and risk avoidance become paramount
  • , the world's economy is today driven more by policy makers than at any time in recent history. At the behest of government officials, banks have been shielded from the consequences of their market decisions, and in many cases exempt from prosecution for their potential law-breaking. Nation-state policy-makers pick the winners in industries
  • How can you use classical competitive analysis to examine the future of markets when the relationships between firms and government agencies are so incestuous and the choices of consumers so severely limited by industrial consolidation?
  • Companies still need guidance, but if rational analysis is nearly impossible, is it any wonder that executives are asking for less of it? What they are asking for is something, well, less productive.
  • executives today do not do well when their analysts confront them with challenging, though often relatively benign, predictions. Confusion, anger, and psychological transference are common responses to unwelcome analysis.
Javier E

Immigrants Played Role in Majority of U.S. Technical Patents, Study Finds - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nical-patents-study-finds.html

immigration innovation economic benefit

shared by Javier E on 12 Jul 12 - Cached
  • immigrants played a role in more than three out of four patents at the nation’s top research universities.
  • nearly all the patents were in science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM fields that are a crucial driver of job growth.
  • “No one is asking what is in their best interest, the American worker,” said eric Ruark, director of research for the Federal for American Immigration Reform, an advocacy group that is pushing for reduced immigration. “It’s what is best for the employers. What is best for the foreign workers. It’s not as if the foreign workers aren’t skilled. What’s being ignored is we already have a domestic work force that has the same skills.”
Javier E

Spinoza and The First Amendment - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...zas-vision-of-freedom-and-ours

freedom Spinoza government censorship

shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 12 - Cached
  • As Spinoza points out, it is “impossible” for a person’s mind to be under another’s control, and this is a necessary reality that any government must accept. The more difficult case, the true test of a regime’s commitment to toleration, concerns the liberty of citizens to express those beliefs, either in speech or in writing.
  • No matter what laws are enacted against speech and other means of expression, citizens will continue to say what they believe (because they can), only now they will do so in secret. The result of the suppression of freedom is, once again, resentment and a weakening of the bonds that unite subjects to their government. In Spinoza’s view, intolerant laws lead ultimately to anger, revenge and sedition
  • Spinoza also argues for freedom of expression on utilitarian grounds — that it is necessary for the discovery of truth, economic progress and the growth of creativity.
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  • Spinoza’s extraordinary views on freedom have never been more relevant. In 2010, for example, the United States Supreme Court declared constitutional a law that, among other things, criminalized certain kinds of speech. The speech in question need not be extremely and imminently threatening to anyone or pose “a clear and present danger” (to use Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ phrase). It may involve no incitement to action or violence whatsoever; indeed, it can be an exhortation to non-violence. In a troubling 6-3 decision, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Court, acceding to most of the arguments presented by President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, upheld a federal law which makes it a crime to provide support for a foreign group designated by the State Department as a “terrorist organization,” even if the “help” one provides involves only peaceful and legal advice, including speech encouraging that organization to adopt nonviolent means for resolving conflicts and educating it in the means to do so.
  • Now Spinoza does not support absolute freedom of speech. He explicitly states that the expression of “seditious” ideas is not to be tolerated by the sovereign. There is to be no protection for speech that advocates the overthrow of the government, disobedience to its laws or harm to fellow citizens. The people are free to argue for the repeal of laws that they find unreasonable and oppressive, but they must do so peacefully and through rational argument; and if their argument fails to persuade the sovereign to change the law, then that must be the end of the matter.
  • Spinoza draws the line, albeit a somewhat hazy one, between ideas and action. The government, he insists, has every right to outlaw certain kinds of actions. As the party responsible for the public welfare, the sovereign must have absolute and exclusive power to monitor and legislatively control what people may or may not do. But Spinoza explicitly does not include ideas, even the expression of ideas, under the category of “action.” As individuals emerged from a state of nature to become citizens through the social contract, “it was only the right to act as he thought fit that each man surrendered, and not his right to reason and judge.”
  • We seem ready not only to engage in a higher degree of self-censorship, but also to accept a loosening of legal protections against prior restraint (whether in print publications or the dissemination of information via the Internet), unwarranted surveillance, unreasonable search and seizure, and other intrusive measures. [2] Spinoza, long ago, recognized the danger in such thinking, both for individuals and for the polity at large
Javier E

Silicon Valley Worries About Addiction to Devices - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...bout-addiction-to-devices.html

tech addiction

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • founders from Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Zynga and PayPal, and executives and managers from companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco and others listened to or participated
  • they debated whether technology firms had a responsibility to consider their collective power to lure consumers to games or activities that waste time or distract them.
  • Eric Schiermeyer, a co-founder of Zynga, an online game company and maker of huge hits like FarmVille, has said he has helped addict millions of people to dopamine, a neurochemical that has been shown to be released by pleasurable activities, including video game playing, but also is understood to play a major role in the cycle of addiction. But what he said he believed was that people already craved dopamine and that Silicon Valley was no more responsible for creating irresistible technologies than, say, fast-food restaurants were responsible for making food with such wide appeal. “They’d say: ‘Do we have any responsibility for the fact people are getting fat?’ Most people would say ‘no,’&nbsp;” said Mr. Schiermeyer. He added: “Given that we’re human, we already want dopamine.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “The responsibility we have is to put the most powerful capability into the world,” he said. “We do it with eyes wide open that some harm will be done. Someone might say, ‘Why not do so in a way that causes no harm?’ That’s naïve.” “The alternative is to put less powerful capability in people’s hands and that’s a bad trade-off,” he added.
  • the Facebook executive, said his primary concern was that people live balanced lives. At the same time, he acknowledges that the message can run counter to Facebook’s business model, which encourages people to spend more time online. “I see the paradox,” he said.
  • she believed that interactive gadgets could create a persistent sense of emergency by setting off stress systems in the brain — a view that she said was becoming more widely accepted. “It’s this basic cultural recognition that people have a pathological relationship with their devices,” she said. “People feel not just addicted, but trapped.”
  • Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google and one of the leaders of the mindfulness movement, said the risks of being overly engaged with devices were immense.
  • anonymous on 26 Jul 12
     
    First, I would like to point out that I read this article while distracted from my Extended Essay. Paradoxical, I know. The article points out many of the negative qualities of the glamorous lure of the internet. I found it interesting that internet usage can actually stimulate the production of dopamine in the body, making our attraction to the computer both a "high" and a true addiction. Not only have I seen an increasing number of articles on this topic in the past week or so, but I have also seen a rather large amount of articles pertaining to the "depression inducing" effect of the internet. Drawing from another article, logging onto social networking sites automatically bombards us with pictures of people we know having fun. Their pictures are beautiful and their status updates are witty. It is easy to see all of this content and immediately think something along the lines of: "why isn't my life that fun/hilarious/exciting?" or "I really wish that I were vacationing in Bora Bora". What we need to remember is that people choose what goes online, and, therefore, only choose to share the most glamourous sides of their lives. And let's not forget that those pictures most likely have at least one or more Instagram filter on them...
Javier E

Turkish Leader Disowns Trials That Helped Him Tame Military - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-helped-him-tame-military.html

turkey justice system politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • In an assertion reminiscent of the many denials over the years by the officers and their lawyers, Mr. Erdogan’s office released a statement saying that the recordings released on Monday were “a product of an immoral montage that is completely false.”
  • Many of the prosecutors and investigators in both cases — the corruption inquiry and the old military trials — are followers of Fethullah Gulen,
  • Recently, under pressure from the government, Turkish lawmakers voted to abolish the special courts in which the officers were tried, a significant step toward new trials. Variations of these courts, set up under antiterrorism laws, have been in place in Turkey since the 1970s. They operate under special rules that allow secret witnesses and wiretaps that would not be admissible in regular courts.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • More remarkably, one of the judges involved in the trials, Koksal Sengun, recently said that he had never read all the indictments, and that if he had he would never have accepted them as legitimate. “I would have rejected the indictment for many reasons now,” he said in an interview with the Turkish news website T24.
  • top adviser to Mr. Erdogan, Yalcin Akdogan, who is considered the prime minister’s mouthpiece, has called those military cases a “plot against their own country’s national army,” which is now being replicated in the corruption investigation against the government. A government watchdog recently issued a report that determined that some of the evidence against the military was manipulated.
  • That makes them vulnerable to manipulation for political ends, legal analysts say. “The courts are specially designed for the government to use the judicial forces against opponents,” said Metin Feyzioglu, the head of Turkey’s bar association. “They managed to get the military out of politics,” but “that was not the right way to do it.”
  • These cases, Ergenekon and Sledgehammer, are the two pillars of Erdogan’s now autocratic system,” said Selim Yavuz, a lawyer who represents his father, a former army general who was convicted and imprisoned in Sledgehammer. “People saw if he could do this to the army, he could do it to anyone. Now he is seen as the almighty.”
  • In 2005, years before the trials, a man affiliated with the Gulen movement approached Eric S. Edelman, then the AmErican ambassador, at a party in Istanbul and handed him an envelope containing a handwritten document that supposedly laid out a plan for an imminent coup. But as Mr. Edelman recounted, he gave the documents to his colleagues and they were determined to be forgeries.
  • is putting new light on what has been hailed, here and abroad, as Mr. Erdogan’s most important achievement: securing civilian control over the military. The way it was done, however, is now increasingly viewed as an act of revenge by Turkey’s Islamists against their former oppressors in the military
  • n now moving to discredit some of the evidence, Mr. Erdogan’s government is walking a tightrope, clinging to its record of democratizing the country and removing the military from politics, while putting distance between itself and the tactics employed to do so.
  • When the corruption investigation went public, Gareth Jenkins, a longtime writer and analyst in Turkey, said he noticed several similarities in tactics to the investigation of the military, and listed them: the same prosecutors, the use of simultaneous dawn raids on the homes and offices of suspects, an immediate defamation campaign in the Gulen-affiliated news media, and the leaks of wiretapped conversations.
  • They substantially weakened the military politically and empowered a mafia within the state,” Mr. Rodrik said. “That’s their record.”
Javier E

A Marijuana Stash That Carried Little Risk - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-that-carried-little-risk.html

stop-and-frisk

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • While scores of people are arrested on these charges every day in New York, the laws apparently don’t apply to middle-aged white guys. Or at least they aren’t enforced against us.
  • About 87 percent of the marijuana arrests in the Bloomberg era have been of blacks and Latinos, most of them men, and generally under the age of 25 — although surveys consistently show that whites are more likely to use it.
  • These drug busts were the No. 1 harvest of the city’s stop, question and frisk policing from 2009 through 2012, according to a report released Thursday by the New York State attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman. Marijuana possession was the most common charge of those arrested during those stops. The few whites and Asians arrested on these charges were 50 percent more likely than blacks to have the case “adjourned in contemplation of dismissal,” the report showed.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • having a little bit of pot, like a joint, is not a crime as long as you don’t burn or openly display it. Having it in my backpack was a violation of law, meaning that it is an offense that is lower than a misdemeanor. Pot in the backpack is approximately the same as making an illegal turn in a car. Taking it out and waving it in the face of a police officer or lighting up a joint on the street would drive it up to the lowest-level misdemeanor.
  • How was it that all the black and Latino males were displaying or burning pot where it could be seen by the police? The answer is that many of them were asked during the stops to empty their pockets. What had been a concealed joint and the merest violation of the law was transformed into a misdemeanor by being “openly displayed.”
  • LAST year, the Bronx Defenders, which represents poor people in criminal court, tried to have suppression hearings in 54 cases involving marijuana possession. In such hearings, the police officer would have been required to testify about the circumstances under which the marijuana was found. If it was the result of an illegal search, the judge could have barred the use of the evidence. But not once did the hearings go forward: missing paperwork, officer’s day off, the drip, drip of wasted time. On average, each case required five court appearances, and stretched over eight months. Most of the charges were dropped or lowered to noncriminal violations. The process itself was the punishment, and it was inflicted almost exclusively on blacks and Latinos.
katyshannon

Justice Department set to free 6,000 prisoners, largest one-time release - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-aa5b-f78a98956699_story.html

justice department release prisoners

shared by katyshannon on 07 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department is set to release about 6,000 inmates early from prison — the largest one-time release of federal prisoners — in an effort to reduce overcrowding and provide relief to drug offenders who received harsh sentences over the past three decades, according to U.S. officials.
  • inmates from federal prisons nationwide will be set free by the department’s Bureau of Prisons between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2. About two-thirds of them will go to halfway houses and home confinement before being put on supervised release. About one-third are foreign citizens who will be quickly deported, officials said.
  • The commission’s action is separate from an effort by President Obama to grant clemency to certain nonviolent drug offenders, an initiative that has resulted in the early release of 89 inmates.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The panel estimated that its change in sentencing guidelines eventually could result in 46,000 of the nation’s approximately 100,000 drug offenders in federal prison qualifying for early release. The 6,000 figure, which has not been reported previously, is the first tranche in that process.
  • an additional 8,550 inmates would be eligible for release between this Nov. 1 and Nov. 1, 2016.
  • The releases are part of a shift in the nation’s approach to criminal justice and drug sentencing that has been driven by a bipartisan consensus that mass incarceration has failed and should be reversed.
  • Along with the commission’s action, the Justice Department has instructed its prosecutors not to charge low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who have no connection to gangs or large-scale drug organizations with offenses that carry severe mandatory sentences.
  • The U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously for the reduction last year after holding two public hearings in which members heard testimony from then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., federal judges, federal public defenders, state and local law enforcement officials, and sentencing advocates. The panel also received more than 80,000 public comment letters, with the overwhelming majority favoring the change.
  • The policy change is referred to as “Drugs Minus Two.” Federal sentencing guidelines rely on a numeric system based on different factors, including the defendant’s criminal history, the type of crime, whether a gun was involved and whether the defendant was a leader in a drug group.
  • An average of about two years is being shaved off eligible prisoners’ sentences under the change. Although some of the inmates who will be released have served decades, on average they will have served 8 &nbsp;1/2 years instead of 10 &nbsp;1/2 , according to a Justice Department official.
  • “Even with the Sentencing Commission’s reductions, drug offenders will have served substantial prison sentences,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said. “Moreover, these reductions are not automatic. Under the commission’s directive, federal judges are required to carefully consider public safety in deciding whether to reduce an inmate’s sentence.”
  • katyshannon on 07 Oct 15
     
    Justice Department is set to free 6,000 prisoners this year.
jongardner04

Eric Trager and Marina Shalabi | In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood's New Leaders Turn Revolutionary to Stay Revelant - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...slim-brotherhood-gets-facelift

shared by jongardner04 on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Amr Farrag is a prominent Muslim Brotherhood youth cadre. The 28-year-old Cairene is a widely followed exponent of the organization’s ideology on social media and manages the popular pro-Brotherhood news portal Rassd. But these days, he no longer operates in Cairo. On July 5, 2013—two days after the Egyptian military responded to mass protests by removing Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi—the organization’s leaders urged Farrag to relocate to Istanbul, so that he could evade the Egyptian government’s anti-Brotherhood crackdown and reestablish the organization’s media operations in exile. Meanwhile, as many more Muslim Brothers fled to Turkey during the chaotic weeks that followed Morsi’s ouster, the Brotherhood formed a committee in Istanbul to resettle them, hoping to preserve the organization until it could return to power in Egypt, which it promised its members would happen very soon.
Javier E

A Murky Road Ahead for Android, Despite Market Dominance - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-despite-market-dominance.html

OS tech platform mobile phone economics

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. Google’s once underappreciated side bet has become Earth’s dominant computing platform
  • Google’s version of Android faces increasing competition from hungry rivals, including upstart smartphone makers in developing countries that are pushing their own heavily modified take on the software. There are also new threats from Apple, which has said that its recent record number of iPhone sales came, in part, thanks to people switching from Android.
  • Hanging over these concerns is the question of the bottom line. Despite surging sales, profits in the Android smartphone business declined 44 percent in 2014
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Over the holidays last year, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business.
  • How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android?
  • Google is sanguine about Android’s prospects and said the company’s original vision for Android was never solely about huge profits. “The bet that Larry, Sergey and Eric made at the time was that smartphones are going to be a thing, there’s going to be Internet on it, so let’s make sure there’s a great smartphone platform out there that people can use to, among other things, access Google services
  • The fact that Google does not charge for Android, and that few phone manufacturers are extracting much of a profit from Android devices, means that much of the globe now enjoys decent smartphones and online services for low prices
  • at the same time, given the increasing threats to Google’s advertising business, we might also wonder how long that largess can continue.
  • The situation is especially painful for Google in China, the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market, where Google’s apps are blocked. Even in the rest of Asia, where many low-cost phone manufacturers do include Google’s apps on their phones, there’s growing interest in finding some alternative to Google’s version of Android. About 30 percent of Android smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2014 were actually modified, or forked, versions of the OS that may not be very hospitable to Google’s services, according to the firm ABI Research
  • even if hot Silicon Valley start-ups still create apps for iOS first, app makers in other parts of the world see Android as a surer path to the masses. “The reality is that folks like you should play a role in educating the Silicon Valley,” she said.
  • Google’s strategy of giving Android to phone makers free has led to a surge of new entrants in the phone business, several of which sell high-quality phones for cut-rate prices. Among those is Xiaomi, a Chinese start-up making phones that have become some of the most popular devices in China.
  • Because Xiaomi and others don’t make much of a profit by selling phones, they’re all looking for other ways to make money — and for many, the obvious business is in apps offering mail, messaging and other services that compete with Google’s own moneymaking apps.
  • A brighter spot for Google is the revenue it collects from sales via Android’s app store, called Google Play. For years, Android apps were a backwater, but sales have picked up lately. In 2014, Google Play sold about $10 billion in apps, of which Google kept about $3 billion (the rest was paid out to developers). Apple makes more from its App Store. Sales there exceeded $14 billion in 2014, and rising iPhone sales in China have led to a growing app haul for Apple. Still, Google’s app revenue is becoming an increasingly meaningful piece of its overall business, and it is also growing rapidly.
  • Cyanogen, has raised about $100 million from several investors — and has signed a “strategic partnership” with Google’s arch-competitor Microsoft — to sell phone makers an alternative user interface that works on top of Google’s Android.
  • “We share services revenue with the phone makers — and today they get very little of that from Google,” said Kirt McMaster, Cyanogen’s chief executive. “There are very few companies in the world today that really like Google. Nobody wants Google to run the table with this game. So it’s a good time to be a neutral third party. We’re Switzerland, and we want to share that revenue with our ecosystem partners in a meaningful way.”
  • in the long run, the rise of Android switching sets up a terrible path for Google — losing the high-end of the smartphone market to the iPhone, while the low end is under greater threat from noncooperative Android players like Xiaomi and Cyanogen.
Javier E

Eli Pariser on the future of the Internet - War Room - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

personalization filtering bubble politics values net-neutrality

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it's also happening in a bunch of places where it's much less visible. For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you'll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn't true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.
  • What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There's a looping going on where if you have an interest, you're going to learn a lot about that interest. But you're not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won't learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you're not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. You can't witness it happening because it's baked into the fabric of the information environment.
  • The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it's about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • So there's this enormous flood of bits, and we need help trying to sort through it. We turn to these personalization agents to sift through it for us automatically and try to pick out the useful bits. And that's fine as far as it goes. But the technology is invisible. We don't know who it thinks we are, what it thinks we're actually interested in. At the end, it's a set of code, it's not a person, and it locks us into a specific kind of pixelated versions of ourselves. It locks us into a set of check boxes of interest rather than the full kind of human experience. I don't think with this information explosion that you can go back to an unfiltered and unpersonalized world. But I think you can bake into the code a sense of civic importance. You can have a sense that there are some things that we all need to be paying attention to, that we all need to be worried about, where you do want to see the top link on BP for everyone, not just investment information if you're interested in investments.
  • change happens on a bunch of levels, and the first is on an individual level. You can make sure that you're constantly seeking out new and interesting and provocative sources of information. Think of this as your information diet. The narcissistic stuff that makes you feel like you have all the right ideas and all the right opinions -- our brains are calibrated to love that stuff because in nature, in normal life, it's very rare. Now we have this thing that's feeding us lots of calories of that stuff. It takes some discipline to forgo the information junk food and seek out stuff that's a little more challenging.
  • the second piece is we've had institutions that have been mediating what we get to know for a long time. For most of the last century they were newspapers that produced about 85 percent of the news in that model. They were always commercial entities. But because they were making so much money, they were able to afford a sense of civics, a sense that the New York Times was going to put Afghanistan on the front page, even if it doesn't get the most clicks. So newspapers found this kind of happy medium that didn't always work perfectly, but it worked better than the alternative. I think now the baton is passing to Google, to Facebook, to the new filters to develop the same kind of sense of ethics about what they do. If you talk to the engineers, they're very resistant because they feel like this is just code, it doesn't have values, it's not a human thing. But of course they're writing code, and every human-made system has a sense of values.
  • the Internet was built on the principle that it would carry all different types of data. And it didn't really care what kind of data it was carrying. It was going to make sure that it got from Point A to Point B. That's the Internet: There's kind of a social contract between all the machines on the Internet that says, "I'll carry your data if you carry my data, and we'll leave it to the people on the edges of the network -- to your home PC or the PC that you're sending something to -- to figure out what the data means." That's the net neutrality principle.
  • big companies like Verizon and Comcast are looking at how the Internet is eroding their profit margins. They're saying to themselves, what can we do to get a piece of this growing pie? They want a tiered Internet where you can pay them to go to the front of the line with your data. That will really erode that amazing thing we all know the Internet facilitates: that anyone with an idea can reach the world. You talk to venture capitalists and they're scared. They say a new start-up is just never going to be able to buy the speed that a Google or a Microsoft will be able to. Incumbent industries will be able to get their data to you quickly and new start-ups won't have a chance. And as a result, you'll have a drying up of the entrepreneurialism that's happened on the Internet. And you'll have a drying up of the Wikipedias, the nonprofit projects. Wikipedia works because it's just as fast as Google. When Wikipedia starts to slow way down relative to Google, you're more likely to just go to Google
jlessner

Police Killings Reveal Chasms Between Races - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...veal-chasms-between-races.html

police races politics culture US

shared by jlessner on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • said her relatives seemed more outraged by the demonstrations than the killing, which she saw as an injustice.
  • Race has never been an easy topic of conversation in America. But the recent high-profile deaths of black people at the hands of police officers in Ferguson, New York, Cleveland and elsewhere — and the nationwide protests those deaths spurred — have exposed sharp differences about race relations among friends, co-workers, neighbors and even relatives in unexpected and often uncomfortable ways.
  • Put bluntly, many people say, they feel they are being forced to pick a team.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Many described being surprised to learn, often on social media, about the opinions — and stereotypes — held by family and friends about people of other races. In some cases, those relationships have fractured, in person and online.Continue reading the main story
Javier E

How Obama Backed Impunity For War Crimes « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...hy-arent-the-torturers-in-jail

torture war crime war civilization human rights

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • There should, in my mind, be no debate about prosecutions for war crimes. Seriously, can you imagine the US opposing such prosecutions if they were in a foreign country? Besides, the US’ clear international and domestic legal obligations admit of no exception for the prosecution of those credibly accused of torture – let alone of those, like Cheney, who have openly bragged about it. It specifically bars any exception in the case of national emergency. Not to prosecute because of such an emergency is therefore to end the Geneva Conventions – which is what Obama has effectively done. He must not be let off the hook for that fateful step – and what it does to the core meaning of the United States.
  • From now on, the US is a human rights violator of the first order under international law, a rogue state that has explicitly tortured innocent people and never held anyone legally responsible. I know that sounds terribly harsh. But how is it untrue? And to refuse to prosecute war crimes is to condone war crimes.
  • And the fact that we are the most powerful country on earth makes this about much more than just us. It casts a dark and long shadow over humanity. It makes torture everywhere more likely, and more pervasive. It legitimizes evil. It removes from us any moral standing when it comes to Americans being tortured by these very same techniques – as they already have been in Syria, and as they will be in the future.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • We didn’t just break Iraq; we broke the very structure of basic human rights that this country fought two world wars to establish.
  • Attorney General Holder announced in 2012 that a special prosecutor who investigated 101 cases found that “the admissible evidence would not be sufficient” to convict beyond a reasonable doubt. Perhaps he felt that crucial evidence would have disclosed state secrets, or concluded that victim testimony by accused terrorists would never convince an American jury. The greatest danger of jury trials would be a string of “patriotic acquittals” of defendants who would say they acted to save American lives, which would create terrible pro-torture precedents to haunt us for years.
  • That’s by far the best argument against doing so, along with much deeper partisan divisions and political polarization. I see the logic of it – but it is based on an acquiescence to and appeasement of evil.
  • By not prosecuting, we are creating an incentive for such awful things to be done again. We are empowering the Leviathan to torture prisoners in future knowing it can get away with anything.
  • Far from ensuring that these awful crimes never happen again, Obama has all but ensured that they will. That will be part of his legacy: the sounds of a torture victim crying in the dark, and knowing that America is fine with it. It is, in that sense, the end of America as much of the world has known it.
Javier E

Before Paris Shooting, Authors Tapped Into Mood of a France 'Homesick at Home' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-profound-french-anxiety-.html

france literature islam authors

shared by Javier E on 09 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Though Mr. Zemmour’s is a work of reactionary nostalgia and Mr. Houellebecq’s a futuristic fantasy, both books have hit the dominant note in the national mood today: “inquiétude,” or profound anxiety about the future.
  • broadly, concern has grown that the political center is eroding and that extremes are rising in a way reminiscent of the 1930s, along with a sense that France, which prides itself on its republican tradition and strong, centralized state, has ceded too much power to the European Union.
  • “Houellebecq uses his talent, if I may say so, to exalt or to highlight this aspect of a collective fear that is descending upon us,” the philosopher Malek Chebel, who is Muslim, said on France 2 television this week. “I reproach him for it, all the more so that he is a great writer, and when you are a great writer, you have more responsibilities.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “I think this anxiety is the idea of seeing France give up on itself, of changing to the point of no longer being recognizable,” said the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, whose much-debated 2013 book, “L’identité Malheureuse,” or “The Unhappy Identity,” discussed the problems immigration poses for French identity and cultural integration. “People are homesick at home,
  • Mr. Houellebecq rejected the idea that literature could alter events.“I don’t have other examples of a novel changing the course of history,” Mr. Houellebecq said on the same program. “Other things change the course of history. Essays, ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ things like that, but not novels. That has never happened.”Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
  • Mr. Houellebecq called the novel “a political fiction,” in the same vein as those of Joseph Conrad or John Buchan.
  • Commentators said that both “The French Suicide” and “Submission” would ultimately shore up the political fortunes of the National Front, a growing if incoherent mix of anti-establishment nativism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-NATO and anti-European Union fervor.
  • “The left has nothing to propose or to respond, and Zemmour and Houellebecq profit from this absence,” said Eric Naulleau, Mr. Zemmour’s more left-leaning co-host on a weekly television program and the author of a 2005 essay critical of Mr. Houellebecq.“One flees to the past and the other flees to the future,” Mr. Naulleau added of the two authors, “but neither offers any answers.”
jlessner

Police Keep Using Chokeholds, Despite Bans and Scrutiny - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...despite-bans-and-scrutiny.html

police scrutiny US politics history culture policy

shared by jlessner on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Before pepper spray, Tasers, expandable batons and portable radios, New York police officers facing resistance from a criminal suspect had another option: the chokehold. By 1993, though, the New York Police Department had joined departments in other large cities by banning the chokehold with an order that amounted to, in the words of former Chief of Department John F. Timoney: “Stay the hell away from the neck.”
  • The public anger that followed a grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer fueled demonstrations across the country, and in New York, the protests laid bare a rift between Mayor Bill de Blasio and the police.
  • On Monday, the newly created city inspector general for the Police Department said, in its first report, that in several cases reviewed, police officers went to the move as a “first act of physical force” when facing “mere verbal confrontation.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • And, as the Police Department, prompted by Mr. Garner’s death, undertakes a sweeping review of its use-of-force policies, senior commanders have been taking a hard look at the chokehold ban.
qkirkpatrick

Terror plan was to kill Belgian police on the streets, in stations, prosecutor says - CNN.com - 0 views

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

terror politics

shared by qkirkpatrick on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • (CNN)Two terror suspects killed in a shootout in eastern Belgium this week were among more than a dozen people rounded up in across-the-country raids designed to stop a group's allegedly imminent attack -- a plot to kill Belgian police in streets and stations -- the nation's federal prosecutor said Friday.
  • The alleged plotters -- including two people killed Thursday night in a battle with police in Verviers -- were confronted in 12 raids across Belgium from Thursday into Friday, federal prosecutor Eric van der Sypt said.
Javier E

Will 7-1 Traumatize Brazilians? -- Science of Us - 0 views

nymag.com/...-cup-implosion-brazilians.html

brazil football

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The problem is that soccer dominance is an important part of Brazil's sports identity, and this loss cut to the core of it. As Eric Simons, author of&nbsp;The Secret Lives of Sports Fans, explained in an email, "If you're Brazilian, your identity is based on self-concept that you're always the best soccer team in the world, and you know that everyone else knows it, so you're proud." So the pain of losing isn't, in this case, that of an underdog happy to be there, and for the Brazilians to lose in this manner is to collide violently against all sorts of national expectations and self-conceptions.
  • "What happens when your pride, self-concept, and identity are suddenly obliterated in front of the entire world?" said Simons. "I don't know. I don't know if anyone does; this is, in sports, something of an unprecedented self-esteem catastrophe. Has anyone that good, with that much expectation, every lost that badly before, with so many people watching?"&nbsp;The answer to that question may be no, which would mean we're in somewhat uncharted sports-trauma territory.
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