Saturday, January 31, 2015

"This map shows which states led the way on America's drive toward mass incarceration"

"While incarceration can help bring down crime to some degree, criminal justice experts generally agree US imprisonment has become an ineffective deterrent to crime as it's extended far beyond the point of diminishing returns. Federal and state data shows there is no correlation between decreases in the prison population and rises in crime. And an analysis by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project found the 10 states that shrunk incarceration rates the most over the past five years saw bigger drops in crime than the 10 states where incarceration rates most grew."
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/3/7485853/mass-incarceration-map

The best thing is that the Ad that probably Google? chose to place on this page while I was reading was for a criminal justice college program to become a law enforcement officer or corrections officer.

"Native Intelligence"

"Tisquantum worked hard to prove his value to the Pilgrims. He was so successful that when some anti-British Indians abducted him, the colonists sent out a military expedition to get him back. Never did the newcomers ask themselves why he might be making himself essential. But from the Pilgrims’ accounts of their dealings with him, the answer seems clear: the alternative to staying in Plymouth was returning to Massasoit and renewed captivity.
Recognizing that the colonists would be unlikely to keep him around forever, Tisquantum decided to gather together the few Native survivors of Patuxet and reconstitute the old community at a site near Plymouth. More ambitious still, he hoped to use his influence on the English to make this new Patuxet the center of the Wampanoag confederation, thereby stripping the sachemship from Massasoit. To accomplish these goals, as Governor Bradford later recounted, he intended to play the Indians and English against each other...
In the 1970s, when I attended high school, a popular history text was America: Its People and Values. Nestled among colorful illustrations of colonial life was a succinct explanation of Tisquantum’s role...America: Its People and Values never explains why he so enthusiastically helped the people who had invaded his homeland. Skipping over such complexities is understandable in a book with limited space. The lack of attention, however, is symptomatic of a larger failure to consider Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives.""
Read this read this read this.
I should just make a list of things I wish we had learned in American History, because it's something I say so often. 

FB:ugh the deep inadequacies of my history instruction. There are so many important reasons why this should not be the first time I am encountering these perspectives

Friday, January 30, 2015

"'American Sniper,' 'Selma' and the search for 'truth'"

Both groups of critics are right.
Both also miss the point.
It’s true that both movies are headed to the Oscars as nominees this year. It’s also true, if sometimes apparently forgotten, that neither was nominated in the Best Documentary category. These are historical dramas – emphasis on the second word – and like all dramas follow certain rules of conflict and catharsis.
But life is a lot messier than a well-made play. And it’s when writers start trying to turn the day-to-day into a three-act story, complete with character arcs and clear-cut antagonists, that some things get left out, others loom larger than they should and a concept like “indisputable truth” begins to disappear.
… When it comes to the world of the heart, we’re willing to give storytellers the right to bend the truth.
But when it comes to race or politics, that forgiveness disappears.”

This is unexpectedly fantastic (unexpected because I have never encountered nj.com before and totally randomly stumbled upon this on - http://newsmap.jp/)
This line “seasoned sparingly with facts, as if the truth were something akin to Tabasco”

“When Racism Can’t Be Ignored”

“Ms. Wiest, 66, said that she took this role in part “to explore my own latent racism.” This has not been easy. Ms. Pinkins, 52, who had joined the cast “to be in the room with Cynthia and Dianne,” was also finding the work difficult. Though she said that she experiences racism “probably at some point every single day,” she’d long since learned to shrug it off.
The play doesn’t allow that. She has to access her anger, her vulnerability. “To really do this character well I have to reveal the part of myself that I spend most of my life suppressing,” Ms. Pinkins said.”

This sounds like an interesting/terrifying process – I wonder if it is ultimately healthy? Or, like, it should be healthy but it needs to be done in a really safe space and also what do you do afterwards? How do you then interact with a world that doesn’t recognize that process?

"Your Waitress, Your Professor"

In class I emphasize the value of a degree as a means to avoid the sort of jobs that I myself go to when those hours in the classroom are over. A colleague in my department labeled these jobs (food and beverage, retail and customer service — the only legal work in abundance in Las Vegas) as “survival jobs.” He tells our students they need to learn that survival work will not grant them the economic security of white-collar careers. I never told him that I myself had such a job, that I needed our meeting to end within the next 10 minutes or I’d be late to a seven-hour shift serving drunk, needy tourists, worsening my premature back problem while getting hit on repeatedly… It is a shame I share with many of my blue-collar colleagues, a belief that society deems our work inferior, that we have settled on or chosen these paths because we do not have the skills necessary to acquire something better. It is certainly a belief I held for the majority of my undergraduate experience.”

I have this persistent elitism that I sometimes realize is never going to be conquered until I know people who aren’t graduates of elite institutions. I recognize in my elitism the limits of ‘awareness’ to overcome a problem, and the fact that I need to actually sit down and learn and meet and struggle with myself. In essence, I sort of wish I could take this woman’s class.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

“Benedict Cumberbatch and the Right Way to Apologize”

His apology’s thoroughness wouldn't be worth noting if most public figures’ mea culpas weren't so shoddy. The Internet has countless lists of famous folks botching it, sometimes by passive-aggressively expressing remorse only for people’s offense instead of the action that caused it, or by trying to explain away the mistake. Apologies like these can actually make things worse. When Don Lemon basically asked a rape accuser why she didn't bite Bill Cosby and then responded to backlash with, "If my question to her struck anyone as insensitive, I am sorry," it muddied the issue, implying that anyone who took issue with the question was overly touchy.”

It often feels as though apologies are just a way to be able to move past something (for the person who is asking to be forgiven) and forget about it, when they really should be the first step in healing. They should be an opening for saying next ‘and how can I help you recover?’. That moment when you accidentally step on someone’s toe and they are clearly in pain and you stop and apologize verbally and also help them sit down and then ask if there is anything else you can do – and you only don’t do that if you think your life is too busy to deal with the problem you have caused, or if something about the person makes you not want to interact. Like, that should be the model, and we should be self-aware about our choices in those moments.

"Kurdish Forces Declare Victory in Kobani"

Kobani is now “100% cleared” of Islamic-State fighters, Idres Nassan, the deputy foreign minister of Kobani’s Kurdish regional administration, said from the city. He said the Kurdish forces are using momentum from the Kobani victory to continue pushing Islamic State militants out of the hundreds of surrounding villages”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/kurdish-forces-declare-complete-victory-in-kobani-1422362163

"Can psychopaths be cured?"

here’s evidence that psychopaths might have more of a cognitive-processing problem — that they have difficulty paying attention to more than one thing at a time — than an emotional problem. So they focus tightly on a goal (say, stealing money) and lose the contextual information around it (it will make the victim feel sad, it's socially unacceptable, and it could lead to arrest)… In a paper recently published in Clinical Psychological Science, Baskin-Sommers showed that six hours of computer-game training caused measurable improvement in psychopaths' cognitive functioning. (These particular psychopathic individuals were inmates at a correctional facility.)”

"Amid The Stereotypes, Some Facts About Millennials"

"millennials aren't just waiting to get married — marriage is simply less important to many of them, too. The 2014 Clark University Poll of Established Adults also found that 1,000 young people between 25 and 39 do not consider marriage one of the major markers of adulthood. And a Pew analysis of census data projected that 25 percent of millennials will never marry at all."
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/18/354196302/amid-the-stereotypes-some-facts-about-millennials?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2043

I am obsessed with my generation - although apparently no one under the age of 20 identifies as a millennial (or at least not those in my family)

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

"Hero Of Kosher Grocery Siege Will Become A French Citizen"

"Citing Bathily's "act of bravery," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says France will expedite a citizenship application that Bathily filed last July. The minister will also head Bathily's naturalization ceremony next Tuesday. 

More than 300,000 people have signed an online petition calling for Bathily to be made a citizen — and for him to be awarded the Legion of Honor."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/01/15/377535437/hero-of-kosher-grocery-siege-will-become-a-french-citizen?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150115

This is good and happy.

"Episode 64: The 7th Story"

http://thememorypalace.us/2015/01/the-7th-story/

The Memory Palace is this incredible little podcast; it only comes out periodically (sometimes just a few times per year) and every episode is really short, sometimes only a few minutes, but they are all just beautiful monuments to tiny moments in history. 

The host finds these just poignant, forgotten things that happened in mostly American history that are just so, so human and so felt. I save them like chocolates.

And this one in particular was wonderful because it pulls in this moment in history to something that happened at the turn of the 20th Century, and it makes this perfect, perfect homage to the podcast Serial and really the unknowingness of anything that has happened in the past and the reasons why we want to tell those stories.

Just, really, listen to it - you have already spent nearly as much time reading as you will listening.

"Nature Podcast 22 January 2015"

"Each week Nature publishes a free audio show. It's hosted by Kerri Smith, with reporters Noah Baker, Ewen Callaway, Lizzie Gibney, Geoff Marsh and Charlotte Stoddart. Every show features highlighted content from the week's edition ofNature including interviews with the people behind the science, and in-depth commentary and analysis from journalists covering science around the world...This week, the restorative power of young blood, cosmic hard drives and improving the safety of genetically modified organisms."
http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index-2015-01-22.html

This was just a really good episode of the Nature podcast – interesting science and it was also I think better produced than usual?

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

“Social Dynamics in Online Cancer Support Groups”

“Because providing emotional support has implication for the relationship between the provider and recipient, it became less valuable as a signal of caring if it must be explicitly requested. Moreover, failing to receive support after explicitly requesting it has negative consequences for the seeker’s face. Receiving either informational or emotional support positively predicted participants’ satisfaction with support exchanges. Moreover, recipients were more satisfied if the support they received matched the support they sought, at least for informational support. In contrast, they were equally satisfied with emotional and informational support after seeking emotional support, presumably because any response to them was an indicator that others in the community cared about them. Receiving support also influenced members’ continued participation in the group, with emotional support increasing their commitment and informational support decreasing it.”

This feels like just a general truth. I really want to listen in… Will update afterwards

"If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS"

"The Internet is the one place where it’s safe to say whatever you want — nobody will know it’s you. But the same protections that make commenters invulnerable are what make the Internet scary — even downright dangerous — for the commented upon. In this week’s show: what happens when the Internet turns on you?"
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps

This was such. a good episode. Like, it just makes me so happy that it exists as an episode it was so good. It had Lindy West in a really satisfying and well-reflected-on conversation with a man who used to troll her, it had an exploration of the sexism of complaints about women's vocal fry, it had a thoughtful story about comments on a live feed of a wild Osprey nest, and it ended with a great piece on one man's work to create an email app that would help address his anxiety.

listen listen listen listen.


"He Dropped One Letter In His Name While Applying For Jobs, And The Responses Rolled In"

"Although digital job applications would seem to be the ultimate exercise in colorblind hiring,numerous studies and applicants have found the opposite. Employers consciously or subconsciouslydiscriminate against names that sound black or Latino, as reported by the New York Times. One much-cited study found that applicants with white-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks than applicants with black-sounding names, a significant disparity."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/02/jose-joe-job-discrimination_n_5753880.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000047&ir=Black+Voices

There really isn't "just work hard" or even "just work twice as hard", there is only "change the system" because progress means everyone (but especially people with race privilege) have to "work harder" to be socially responsible

Monday, January 26, 2015

"What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe"

"The Only Other Thing I Overheard
Michelle has begun watching Scandal.
“It’s not that exciting,” said the president, of the White House. Staffers “don’t have enough time to engage in too much scandalous behavior.”"

This is hilarious 
(Credit to AI)

Sunday, January 25, 2015

"Honoring The Dead"

"Annalee Newitz comes to terms with grief while exploring the remains of a mysterious ancient city."

I really enjoyed listening to this story, and the point at the end about how protecting our own realities onto mysteries prevents us from discovering the truth. 
I also am really intrigued by this city, and wishing that I had taken some classes on ancient civilizations. The ways we have tried out living, all the different possible ways to be human that we don't know about but that happened for millenia.

"For Accomplished Students, Reaching a Good College Isn’t as Hard as It Seems"

"The most important elite college admissions statistic, then, is not the percentage of applications top schools accept. It’s the percentage of top students who are admitted to at least one top school. And that number isn’t 5 percent or 20 percent or even 50 percent. It’s 80 percent. It turns out that four out of five well-qualified students who apply to elite schools are accepted by at least one."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/upshot/for-accomplished-students-reaching-a-top-college-isnt-actually-that-hard.html

Saturday, January 24, 2015

"Ranking high schools tells you which schools are rich or selective"

College rankings, at least in theory, are responding to a need in the market. Students applying to prestigious, selective colleges — particularly students who have the academic qualifications and the financial means to go to college anywhere — have quite a few to choose from. Enter rankings, a way to sort through it allPublic high school doesn't work this way. The most useful information for you is what the best high school in your city, state, or school district is...Publications know they're mostly ranking on wealth and selectivity. It's why there are separate lists for schools that actually enroll low-income students in both the Daily Beast and Newsweek rankings. So why do it?
Because everybody loves rankings. 
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/11/6123757/ranking-high-schools-makes-no-sense

This makes many very good points, and makes me cringe/giggle about how much we cared at my high school about our rankings.

"Protein Project Could Help Expose Cancer’s Causes"

"It’s pretty hard to look under the hood of a cell,” says Frederick Roth, a biophysicist at the University of Toronto. To jump-start progress, scientists like Roth have been chipping away for years at the human interactome—a complete map of every protein interaction in humans. Last week Roth and his team published a paper in the journal Cell detailing one of the most comprehensive protein maps to date. It covers 14,000 interactions between protein pairs and may help scientists identify some of the genes involved in cancer."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/protein-project-could-help-expose-cancer-s-causes/

Friday, January 23, 2015

"The Trans-Everything CEO"

"these days Martine sees herself less as transgender and more as what is known as transhumanist, a particular kind of futurist who believes that technology can liberate humans from the limits of their biology—including infertility, disease, and decay, but also, incredibly, death. Now, in her spare time, when she’s not running a $5 billion company, or flying her new helicopter up and down the East Coast, or attending to her large family and three dogs, she’s tinkering with ways that technology might push back that ultimate limit. She believes in a foreseeable future in which the beloved dead will live again as digital beings, reanimated by sophisticated artificial-intelligence programs that will be as cheap and accessible to every person as iTunes. “I know this sounds messianic or even childlike,” she wrote to me in one of many emails over the summer. “But I believe it is simply practical and technologically inevitable.”"

"Episode 145: Octothorpe"

"In our current digital age, the hashtag identifies movements, events, happenings, brands—topics of all kinds. The “#” didn’t always have this meaning, though.
It’s had a few different lives.
The hashtag, as we know it, was born one day in 2007."
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/

This was great great - and I love where it gets at the end about language and technology. Lols, Octothorpe.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

"Big Block of Cheese Day Is Back, and It's Feta Than Ever"

"On February 22, 1837, President Jackson had a 1,400-pound block of cheese hauled into the main foyer of the White House for an open house with thousands of citizens and his staff, where they discussed the issues of the day while carving off slabs of cheddar. This year, we aim to do even feta. On Wednesday, January 21, in fromage to President Jackson (and to President Bartlet, if you're a fan of The West Wing), we're hosting the second-annual virtual Big Block of Cheese Day, where members of the Obama administration will take to social media to answer your questions about the President's State of the Union address and the issues that are most important to you."

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/01/16/big-block-cheese-day-back-and-its-feta-ever

I forgot to post this before it happened, but I really enjoy the video, so I am posting it anyway.

“The Secret to Smart Groups Isn't Smart People—It's Women”

That bolded sentence is hiding a lot of heavy conclusions in plain sight. First, neither the average intelligence of the group nor the smartest person in the group had much to do with the group's "c" factor. Just as great artists don't necessarily form great bands when they pool their talents, smart people don't automatically make smart groups.

Furthermore, the predictable troupe of buzzwords you would expect to correlate with successful groups—"cohesion," "motivation," and "satisfaction"—didn't have much to do with effective teams, either. Instead, the single most important element of smart groups, according to the researchers, was their "average social sensitivity." That is, the best groups were also the best at reading the non-verbal cues of their teammates. And, since women score higher on this metric of emotional intelligence, teams with more women tended to be better teams.”

I think this is about listening, looking at people to see how they are and holding in mind an ideal of how the group should be operating. There is a problem where people think ‘how can I be heard to contribute?’ instead of ‘how can I contribute?’ or even ‘how can the team make the best product?’.  There is something here about individuality vs. communality, the blindness of passive egotism.
And also, this thing about women improving team function closing the gender gap is cute but absurd. We are really good at compensating individuals, and bad at compensating teams, and the person who is the best at making a great team probably isn’t going to be the one who is more visible or the most aggressive.
Lastly, ugh, you just said this was a skill – don’t go to ‘men have an innate disadvantage’ here; let’s talk about improving this skill maybe for everyone? I really think the absence of this skill leads to a lot of sexist (and racist and etc…) microaggressions in the failure to be looking to the other person or feeling any responsibility for their feelings.

"Eric Garner: US woman seeks to trademark 'I can't breathe'"

"Mrs Crump told the The Smoking Gun that she had “nothing to do with the Garner family” and had not spoken to them about her trademark bid... She refused to confirm what reason she had behind her filing last Saturday, but claimed her purpose was not to make money and that she had been using the phrase commercial since 18 August."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eric-garner-us-woman-seeks-to-trademark-i-cant-breath-9936753.html
"We exhale lost fat. There it helps plants photosynthesize (if you're feeling noble) and contributes to global warming (if you're feeling guilty).

Exhale more CO2, and you'll lose more weight — especially if you're exhaling more frequently because you're running."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/12/16/371210831/when-you-burn-off-that-fat-where-does-it-go

This is being reported as "Breathing more will help you lose weight!", so watch out for that. This is what was ACTUALLY found, and it's just kind of interesting.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

"Climate change could affect the ratio of human males to human females that are born in some countries, a new study from Japan suggests. The researchers found that male fetuses may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change."

Related to: “Are Men the Weaker Sex?” (shitty title but interesting content)

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

"Why Saying Is Believing — The Science Of Self-Talk"

"It's clear that we all have an internal representation of our own bodies, Coslett says. We need that very specific sense of ourselves to understand how much space we take up — so we can walk and not bump into things, or perform simple tasks, like reaching out a hand and picking up a coffee cup. Studies show that this internal sense of oneself is a powerful thing. Research on what neurologists call motor imagery indicates that the same neurological networks are used both to imagine movement, and to actually move"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/07/353292408/why-saying-is-believing-the-science-of-self-talk

This is useful - talking to yourself in the third person. Try it!

"No Time for Bats to Rest Easy"

 "as scientists are discovering, the bat immune system is astonishingly tolerant of most pathogens — a trait that could pose risks to people, but that also offers clues to preventing human diseases of aging, including cancer...“At this stage, the evidence is anecdotal,” said Lin-Fa Wang, a bat virologist at the Duke-NUS Graduate School in Singapore and the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong. “But of all the bat biologists I’ve spoken with, I’ve only heard of one or two cases of bat tumors.”...Preliminary findings indicate that bats’ apparent indifference to the viral throngs they harbor, together with their Methuselah-grade longevity, probably arose from the adaptations needed to grant them the power of flight."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/science/no-time-for-bats-to-rest-easy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Bats! Also, totally willing to trade the possibility of having cancer for the ability to fly. Totally willing.

so many fun bat facts - like, "bats are the second-most populous mammalian order, after rodents. “One in every five mammals is a bat,” Dr. Reeder said."
(credit to LG)

"Alibi | A witness for every moment"

"Alibi is built around privacy, and seeks to provide evidence of any situation from police interactions, bullying, vehicle accidents, altercations, arguments, workplace harassment, legal disputes and much more. It gives users the confidence to stand up for themselves in the face of misguided authority or misplaced aggression. Never be without an alibi.

huh

"Workplace sexism in America is worse than it is in India"

"Part of the reason is America's more sexualized culture in which men and women relate to each other primarily as sexual beings. When men are confronted with women in positions of authority, they don't have neutral criteria for judging them. The standard male indictments of powerful women are that they are too aggressive or too flirtatious or too matronly. All of these, ultimately, say more about how these women make the men feel — emasculated or attractive or turned off — and less about their job effectiveness."
http://theweek.com/article/index/262003/workplace-sexism-in-america-is-worse-than-it-is-in-india

Love love love different perspectives - so interesting, some perceptions and framing I would never have had. Where truth is the sum of all possible observations, I have now moved closer to a full understanding.

(credit to JL)

Monday, January 19, 2015

"The Herculean Effort Taken By One Group To Show Hollywood Is Sexist"

"In dissecting the top 100 grossing films each year, Smith and her team have analyzed a total of 26,225 characters in 600 films for gender, body type, age, race and more. In theirmost recent annual review, released in July, they found that in 2013, only 29 percent of characters were female, and a mere 28 percent of the films had a female lead or co-lead."
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-measure-women-film-annenberg/

I wished they talked more about race in this piece

"New Insight on a Famous Study"

"Now an analysis of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram’s widely known 1963 “obedience” experiments—inspired in part by the 1961 Eichmann atrocities trial in Jerusalem—refutes assumptions made about the participants in Milgram’s experiments: Rather than mindlessly following brutal orders to inflict pain on others, many were often proud and felt privileged to have contributed to his scientific research. They were not passive conformists blindly following malevolent orders, but rather “engaged followers” who identified with the noble goals of Milgram’s research."
http://theamericanscholar.org/new-insight-on-a-famous-study/

I alps wonder if they did analysis on what kinds of personalities had different experiences with the experiment. I would love to see an experiment of how a person can create that sense of worth, in order to overcome skepticism about behavior.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

"Widow of Hostage Killed in U.S. Raid in Yemen Sees No Blame"

The widow of a South African teacher killed in Yemen said she holds no bitterness about his death during a U.S.-led raid to free an American he was held with.
“What will it help to accuse,” Yolande Korkie told reporters in Johannesburg today, hours after the remains of her husband, Pierre, arrived in the country. “What will it help to find out what happened? Will it bring Pierre back? Never.”"

"Polone: Three Actors Reveal the Awkward Truth of Shooting Sex Scenes"

Have you or the person with whom you’ve been doing a scene ever become, uh, aroused?

Betty: Not to mention any names, but one actor came on me during the take. I had to surreptitiously wipe myself off with the sheet. Fortunately, I liked the guy. I found it a little flattering and a little creepy. We never talked about it, so I can't tell you if it was Method acting on his part or if he just found me pretty, but I suspect I'm not the only actress who's had this experience. But I can tell you that twenty years later, when I run into him, my first thought is, There's the guy that had on-camera sex with my abdomen."
http://www.vulture.com/m/2012/03/shooting-a-sex-scene-polone.html

I have often wondered about this, and this article confirms all my suspicions about the awkward.

"Consider the bra strap."

"During my lifetime, women were not allowed to show their belly buttons on TV. Mary Ann had to wear high mom shorts on “Gilligan’s Island.” Cher was the first in history to show hers in the early 70s, and the ban was not actually lifted till 1983. Barbara Eden had to wear a flesh-colored plug on “I Dream of Jeannie” — that doesn’t even make sense! And neither does sexualizing bra straps.""

https://medium.com/@tracyrkerievsky/consider-the-bra-strap-its-a-bit-of-elastic-on-your-shoulders-i-remember-when-you-didnt-want-f0c637bdcf5d

Saturday, January 17, 2015

"How a crazy scientist duped America into believing vitamin C cures colds"

"Pauling is the only person to ever win two unshared Nobel prizes. In 1949, Pauling and his team studying sickle cell anemia established it as a genetic disease. And he was also, arguably, the person most responsible for the great vitamin C myth... In a letter to Pauling, Stone recommended he take 3,000 mg of vitamin C each day to live longer. Pauling said he began to feel "livelier and healthier" after taking Stone's advice. "In particular, the severe colds I had suffered several times a year all my life no longer occurred."... Pauling became a vitamin C acolyte. He said it would make the common cold disappear completely off the face of the earth. He said vitamins and nutritional supplements could cure everything from retinal detachment to snakebites to the virus that causes AIDS."

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7547741/vitamin-c-myth-pauling

"Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in the film Nightcrawler is 2014 in a nutshell"

See, Lou is a white man, played by a handsome white man who's obscured his good looks a bit but can't hide them entirely. And as such, he believes he's owed some sort of fortune from the world at large, owed a kind of respect from those he meets, simply because of the status he would have had in past American decades. He uses the corporate speak he endlessly babbles as a kind of protective shield, then, as a way to connect himself to other white men, who have been much more successful at closing their deals, at vaulting their own corporate ladders.
And because Lou is who he is, because he looks the way he does, he's able to just keep coming, to never be shut down in the way he should be or the way he deserves. Because he's a white man, he can get away with saying and doing things that anybody else might be rebuffed or arrested for. And because he's a white man, he always feels relatively confident that he's not going to get in trouble when he, say, stages a dramatic police chase.”
I luvvvvv Vox movie reviews

"MODEL MINORITY RAGE: WHY THE HULK SHOULD BE AN ASIAN GUY"

"If I had to pick one, would I rather grow up with people assuming I was going to become a boring, hard-working engineer or doctor than with people assuming I was destined to a life of low education and poverty? No question.

But it would be even better if, like my white peers, I got to pick between being passionate and emotional or being rational and practical based on how I personally felt instead of being pigeonholed...Jewish Americans were in a similar place a few generations ago, with similar cultural baggage, and the voice of Jewish-American entertainers shows their struggle to negotiate with that stereotype and overcome it"
http://thenerdsofcolor.org/2014/07/18/model-minority-rage-why-the-hulk-should-be-an-asian-guy/

I am so into Arthur Chu's writing!

Friday, January 16, 2015

"Terrorists Killed 2,000 People in Nigeria Last Week. So Why Doesn’t the World Care?"

" This silence is not accidental. There is a clear double standard when talking about Western vs. non-Western and Muslim vs. non-Muslim victims of terrorism. Terrorists attacks on the West, and against non-Muslims in particular, are sensationalized in the media while those afflicting non-Westerners and Muslims are normalized and treated as business as usual, generating limited public interest and, in turn, limited outcry from activists and institutions that could actually affect change... Reports about non-Western victims of terrorism are typically restricted unless they can serve a particular agenda, and we saw that again this past week with the media's ominous silence around Boko Haram's massacre of thousands of victims in Borno State. There are no neat narratives surrounding this "Islamic war on women," and no Westerners were killed. It was simply terrorist violence on an unprecedented scale perpetrated against Nigerians, many of whom were Muslim."
http://mic.com/articles/108192/terrorists-killed-2-000-people-in-nigeria-last-week-so-why-doesn-t-the-world-care

This article looks at the statistics on victims of Islamist terrorists, the selectivity of media coverage of victims, and provides information and context on Boko Haram.
This week, ugh, I have been so horrified by the media. Care about more than one thing - expect your audience to care about more than one thing. Feeling the minority status

"Young, Brilliant and Underfunded"

“My point is not to bemoan lost opportunities. Rather, it is to call on my colleagues in Congress to push the N.I.H. to promote promising researchers who are in the prime of their careers. There is now a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives examining this and other questions; here are some suggestions for what to do… Congress should also mandate that the median age of first research awards to new investigators be under 40 within five years, and under 38 within 10 years.”

I am very okay with that suggestion from a totally self-serving perspective J However, the author (an MD formerly with Johns Hopkins who is now a member of the House) calls out specific projects as things that shouldn’t be funded over Alzheimer’s research in a way that super, super over-simplifies how research works and how funding is prioritized and collapses the problem of not enough young investigators being able to get money with like the lack of a cure for Alzheimer’s.
The NIH response: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6206/150.full “NIH officials are hesitant. Sally Rockey, the agency's deputy director for extramural research, says Harris's mandate might not achieve much unless scientists' training can be shortened so that more are ready to compete for NIH grants at a younger age.”

"Relatives of Interned Japanese-Americans Side With Muslims"

"Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin...Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enemy aliens during World War II...Now, Ms. Yasui, along with Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu-Haigh, a son and a daughter of the two other Japanese-American litigants, is urging an appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the sweeping language of the judge’s ruling last year...The brief counters that the ruling “overlooks the nearly 20-year-old declaration by the United States Congress and the president of the United States that the racially selective detention of Japanese aliens during World War II was a ‘fundamental injustice’ warranting an apology and the payment of reparations.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/nyregion/03detain.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

this story is so much American history, and the repeated narratives that occur when we learn about history as though it doesn't say anything about the present (or fail to learn history at all - I am confident that there are many students who never learn about the Japanese Internment Camps, or who are only taught in the context of seeing "how far we have come"). 

Also this - "Since the law also forbade Japanese immigration after 1924, the United States had been home to all of them for at least 17 years on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor." - was a detail I was never taught in what I think was an above-average education on Japanese Internment Camps. (I attended an Elementary School named after a man who hid people on his farm during the 1940s so they wouldn't be forced to go to the camps)

(Credit to CT)

Related: "Is the next civil rights leader Asian-American?"

Thursday, January 15, 2015

"Allen gives $100 million for new Seattle institute to unravel cells"

The long-term goal of the new institute is to better understand the teeming world inside cells, where thousands of organelles and millions of molecules interact in a dynamic ballet that researchers are just beginning to fathom.
“We really don’t have a good idea of how normal cells work, and what goes wrong in disease,” said Rick Horwitz, the former University of Virginia professor who jumped at the chance to lead the new institute. “People spend careers trying to understand little parts of the cell, but nobody has stitched it together — because it’s too complicated for any individual to study.”
The institute will take on the challenge by combining new technologies, such as microscopes that can visualize living cells in three dimensions, with enough computational firepower to make sense of the flood of data that will result, Horwitz said.”

It’s really the best of times and the worst of times to be a biologist – so much amazing stuff happening, and support for science from all sorts of organizations, but not enough funding or infrastructure to support everyone who is training to be a biologist (especially as pharmaceutical companies focus more and more on short-term and low-risk science and decrease the size of in-house research laboratories).
I thought that capitalism was supposed to make sure that this kind of thing balanced out (Yes, I did take an online economics course and start jokingly calling myself an economist!) 

"The biggest surprise in Serial was its perfect ending"

One reason Serial resonated with journalists is those type of questions are central to good reporting, and the podcast was the rare opportunity to air them in the open without a reporting debacle (like Rolling Stone's UVA rape article) having to happen first.
But questions about trust, truth, and decisions aren't unique to reporters — or to murder trial jurors. We all make big decisions with insufficient data. When the question is big enough, when it's a question of love, or money, or life or death, or guilt or innocence, it's hard to have enough data to say you can ever really, truly be sure.”

I think there is a lot going on in culture right now around uncertainty. I think that’s what irony is, a way to engage with uncertainty and still act by avoiding commitment to the behavior. It’s the central theme of New Girl, it was sort of what Modern Family was about at the beginning (‘so, how do we do this family thing if we aren’t all white and heterosexual?’).
A lot of moving forward as a society is admitting that some of the old absolutes we based social structures on are false (ex. women are primarily meant to be mothers and wives to men), but that we don’t know what the actual truth is and we have to be comfortable in the in-between-space while we figure it out.
We are letting ourselves be complex.

"MY CHANCE ENCOUNTER AS CAPTAIN AMERICA WITH A 9/11 RESPONDER"

"In the partisan banter of our news cycles some will find it hard to imagine a short haired, white, Christian police officer having much in common with a long-haired, turbaned, bearded Sikh cartoonist. The multi-layered contours of Sergeant Mercy’s story resonated with me."
http://thenerdsofcolor.org/2014/09/11/my-chance-encounter-as-captain-america-with-a-911-responder/

this is so heartwarming.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

"In an Unequal World, Mocking All Serves the Powerful"

"In practice, however, art is always beholden to forces other than simple truth, and even the most ruthless satirists have their sacred cows. Charlie Hebdo, which fired the cartoonist Sine in 2009 for an antisemitic column, certainly did. American cartoons such as South Park and Family Guy joke about the disabled and the terminally ill, and constantly engage in "envelope-pushing" racist and misogynist humor. But these "no holds barred" shows never mock, say, 9/11 victims, or soldiers killed in Iraq. American newspapers do not publish pro-ISIS cartoons."
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/01/10/when-satire-cuts-both-ways/in-unequal-an-world-mocking-all-serves-the-powerful

short and simple and YES. 
I have been feeling really uncomfortable about the sort of free-speech activism(?) response to the attack on Charlie Hebdo that has led to a reverence for these cartoons that ARE offensive to a LOT of groups - to Muslims and Jews and Christians and French conservative groups, etc... and I am listening to news shows and reading articles and I sort of get it but I am also so uncomfortable because what is this fervent reaction all over the West? Comparing it to how people have reacted to other recent incidences of violence (like the two young American men I can think of off the top of my head who killed multiple classmates in reaction to being rejected by women), what are the values that are amplified by popular consent and energy?

It's also the problematic nature of the "equal-opportunity insulter" thing, as though everyone is standing on some equal level of security and it's an equal thing to insult them at all - and this failure to see that the insults that are used for people who are already oppressed are so tremendously more powerful and involved in maintaining the worst things about the world.

I think it all gets down to: I've been in a space where marches and think pieces are about speaking to a status quo and asking it to change, standing from a place of less power and trying to be heard, and I don't recognize that in this #JeSuisCharlie movement. Who is it trying to talk to ? What is it trying to produce? What kind of a movement is being built?

Or am I expecting unfair things from people who are grieving?