“Twitter's new feature shows how little it cares about harassment”

“The upgrade seems to be marketed to brands and politicians who can use direct messages to communicate with normal users, but it comes with a dark lining. It removes the element of protection that existed when only users who mutually followed each other could DM one another…

For years, users have been begging Twitter to change its harassment policies so that people who use the platform to write online won't be bombarded with an army of anonymous egg avatars waging threats. Twitter, more than many other social networks, is a target for harassment.

Just look at the whole Gamergate fiasco — Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Breanna Wu were all threatened. After Robin Williams's death, his daughter Zelda Williams quit the network because she was being harassed so brutally. A Pew report found that almost half of women users online have been harassed.

Twitter has even admitted that it has a problem.

"We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years," Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote in an internal memo obtained by The Verge in February. "It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day."…

What frustrated so many Twitter users, myself included, was that this development seems to be debuting without a clear strategy for how harassment will be handled within the new program…

IF ANYTHING, ALL THIS "UPDATE" DOES IS REMIND USERS WHO HAVE BEEN ABUSED THAT THEY ARE NOT, AND WILL NOT BE, A PRIORITY”

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/21/8459001/twitter-dm-change

“Super Planet Crash”

“Can you create a planetary system that lasts for 500 years? Super Planet Crash, the featured game, allows you to try. To create up to ten planets, just click anywhere near the central star. Planet types can be selected on the left in order of increasing mass: Earth, Super-Earth, Ice giant, Giant planet, Brown dwarf, or Dwarf star. Each planet is gravitationally attracted not only to the central Sun-like star, but to other planets. Points are awarded, with bonus factors applied for increasingly crowded and habitable systems. The game ends after 500 years or when a planet is gravitationally expelled. Many exoplanetary systems are being discovered in recent years, and Super Planet Crash demonstrates why some remain stable. As you might suspect after playing Super Planet Crash a few times, there is reason to believe that our own Solar System has lost planets during its formation.”

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150112.html

Fun, learning about astronomy and physics – I actually think this would have been great to play with in high school physics and think about gravity and rotation.

(credit to AA)

"Poor teens in Baltimore face worse conditions than those in Nigeria - study"

"In the five neighborhoods examined in the study, poverty was the common thread that linked these culturally diverse locations. Differences among the teens in these urban areas became obvious, however, when it came to how they perceived their state of well-being. 

Teens from Baltimore and Johannesburg, South Africa, viewed their communities more negatively than the other locations in the study. 

The two cities showed the lowest number of teenagers who felt safe in their neighborhoods (percentages ranged from 43.9 percent among males in Johannesburg to 66.1 percent of females in Baltimore), as well as the highest averages for witnessing violence (8.9 percent for males and 7.0 percent among females in Johannesburg; 7.0 percent among males and 6.3 percent among females in Baltimore)...

“When you look at how they perceive their environments, kids in both Baltimore and Johannesburg are fearful. They don’t feel safe from violence,” Mmari said. “This is something we didn’t really see in other cities. In Shanghai, for example, there wasn’t a great deal of violence. You’d ask kids about their safety concerns, and they would say something like, ‘I’m afraid of crossing a busy street.’”"

http://rt.com/usa/210607-baltimore-study-nigeria-health/

“Outlier, outlaw, outcast: The improbable scientific career of Tamer Elsayed”

“Over the next 7 years he pursued a strategy—misguided, he now admits—aimed at leveling a playing field he believes is unfairly tilted against illegal immigrants such as him. In 2000, his behavior finally caught up with him: He was arrested for student loan fraud, for which he pled guilty and served 15 months in a federal prison… Six years after being released from California’s Lompoc Federal Correctional Facility in 2002, he received a Ph.D. in computational mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The next year he was hired as a founding faculty member at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology… In March 2013, KAUST officials confronted him about his past, and a few months later he was booted out of the country…. Elsayed has just self-published an autobiography, Inadmissible. It is not your usual story of a life in science. In frank and poignant prose, Elsayed recounts his tightrope walk through the U.S. immigration system and his improbable ascent into the academic stratosphere before crashing and burning. He describes how his criminal conviction makes it unlikely he’ll ever work again as an academic researcher.”

http://news.sciencemag.org/education/2015/01/outlier-outlaw-outcast-improbable-scientific-career-tamer-elsayed

On the one hand, science is like ‘merit merit merit’, all that matters, if you have that you are golden – and then… There are obvious counterexamples on all sides. And it’s easy to say here ‘well, he’s a criminal’ (which, well, sort of), but then you still have to admit that science isn’t a meritocratic utopia and it is deeply in the context of wider social and political realities that just happen to not impact the predominantly white, male, middle/upper-class people who are held up as most meritorious.

#BanTheBox So much– “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, and the University of Southern California also wanted him. “The only school that said no was Stanford, and it’s the only school that asked about my criminal history,” he tells ScienceInsider. “I think it’s pretty clear why they rejected me.””

“Instagram’s Graveyard Shift”

“I’ve been working at night myself for a long time now. Once it was out of choice, a preference for the quiet hours. More recently it was because I had no choice. Insomnia. One night, I was drinking my third cup of coffee — because when you can’t sleep, you might as well stop trying — and ignoring the deadline looming the next morning. Instead, I stared at the matrix on my phone, my own red eyes scanning a tiny sample of some 670,000 photographs under #nightshift. Most of them were people like me, awake when they didn’t want to be awake. And like me, they were looking at the screen in their hands, held up by the one in mine…

Pan out to take in some fraction of the 670,000 faces. Pay attention to the eyes, drooping or unnaturally wide. Is it fatigue? Or something more? Something less? Stay sane, and the night shift may seem like just another set of hours. Lose yourself to the loneliness, and the daylight leaks out of you. But something else can come in. A kind of calm. The kindness of dark hours.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/magazine/instagrams-graveyard-shift.html?action=click&contentCollection=Magazine&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article

Reading this makes me tired but sort of content. #NightOwl

"Baltimore's real, untelevised revolution"

"I was crushed not because the violence lasted longer than the peace, but because the revolution Baltimore worked hard to create was not televised for what it truly was or is. The revolution was televised as angry citizens burning flags, looting stores and breaking police car windows. This is a skewed portrayal of the protests; it is what the media chose to portray — the media that consumers bewilderingly seem to want.

The real revolution is thousands of people across America standing in solidarity against police brutality. The real revolution is youth activists using their voices and their fearlessness to fight for the future of their generation. The real revolution is people of different races walking through the streets of inner city Baltimore, arms locked, chanting "All night, all day, we will fight for Freddie Gray.""

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-gray-balter-20150427-story.html

I love how this is put; concisely illustrates the problem.

(Credit to EC)

"Nonviolence as Compliance"

"The people now calling for nonviolence are not prepared to answer these questions. Many of them are charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray's death, and yet they can offer no rational justification for Gray's death and so they appeal for calm. But there was no official appeal for calm when Gray was being arrested. There was no appeal for calm when Jerriel Lyles was assaulted. (“The blow was so heavy. My eyes swelled up. Blood was dripping down my nose and out my eye.”) There was no claim for nonviolence on behalf of Venus Green. (“Bitch, you ain’t no better than any of the other old black bitches I have locked up.”) There was no plea for peace on behalf of Starr Brown. (“They slammed me down on my face,” Brown added, her voice cracking. “The skin was gone on my face.")...

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves."
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviolence-as-compliance/391640/

I see this impulsive thing of 'I don't understand why people are rioting and damaging property,' and instead of turning to 'I must not know something; there must be some gap in my experience and knowledge that prevents me from understanding this' the response is 'there must be something wrong with them - why don't they understand that violence is wrong, as much as I do?'.

And we aren't trained to do that with people who are in a social minority; we are trained to understand their motives as more base and short-sighted and uninformed. Members of social minorities are trained to understand their own motives as base and short-sighted and uninformed. We are trained to expect that no one else will understand; we see that, too often, no one else will try.

There is this frustrating and absurd thing where, during a discussion of whether or not some behavior would be racist, a white person will say "Well, I don't see anything offensive about that" - in a tone that implies that this provides an answer to the question, that we can now be satisfied and end the conversation. And I shouldn't have to articulate this but, despite their voices having the most weight, white people have the least perspective on the experience of racism and really need to place themselves in a role of listening and learning.

And this might be a passive aggressive response to one post I saw on Facebook, where a white person was trying to use an out-of-context MLK quote to shame black rioters. Seriously, look at yourself.

"We have a right to be in the streets for Freddie"

"In February of this year, 30-year-old Travon Scott died in a holding cell after allegedly being found having difficulty breathing--although police say no force was used in his arrest. Nineteen-year-old George V. King died from injuries related to officers striking him with a Taser in May 2014, but the officers were not charged.

At age 44, Tyrone West was beaten to death by police and a Morgan State University security guard during a traffic stop in July 2013. No one was charged in his death. Forty-six-year-old Anthony Anderson's death in September 2012 was ruled a homicide by blunt force trauma after police tackled him. But prosecutors decided the officers didn't use excessive force--once again, no one was charged.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, between 2010 and 2014, 109 people died in Maryland after encounters with police--Baltimore City had the highest number in the state at 31. Around 70 percent of those who died from police encounters statewide were Black...

THERE ARE many activists and organizations in Baltimore that have been doing long, painstaking work against police brutality for years, but their struggles have gone largely unreported.

Baltimore Bloc has organized with the families of the victims of police brutality and monitored police activity to keep communities informed. They supported Tawanda Jones, the sister of Tyrone West, who was beaten to death by police in 2013, in her organization of weekly "West Wednesday" protests since her brother was killed.

The Baltimore Algebra Project has called attention to the school-to-prison pipeline and successfully stopped a new youth jail from being constructed. City Bloc is a group of students at Baltimore City College who have led young people in protest against police brutality. The Right to Housing Alliance has been instrumental in fighting the economic violence against targeted Black communities around tenants' rights and the water shutoffs, while also speaking out against police misconduct.

This year, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and Rev. Heber Brown III of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church worked together to push for legislation to amend the "Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights," which is a barrier to police accountability and hinders investigations of civilian complaints...

So far, the response of the political and press establishment to the Baltimore protests has centered on minor vandalism and the 34 arrests. Those arrests were mainly of young Black men, including those who had not been violent, but were targeted for merely being vocal. Many who protested peacefully refuse to distance themselves from those who broke windows because they can see how the media are using this issue to discredit the movement as a whole.

In fact, the massive police mobilization--an estimated 1,200 cops from Baltimore and other jurisdictions, along with state troopers, took part in policing Saturday's protests--has stoked entirely justified anger. In effect, the city mobilized an occupying force to stand guard in front of an empty stadium, long before sports fans arrived--a clear display of the city's priority of protecting property, and not the lives of Black city residents."

http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/27/in-the-streets-for-freddie

A great background on Baltimore and the activism occurring right now.

(Credit to EF)

"Chris Rock Is Taking a Selfie Every Time He Gets Pulled Over by the Police"

""Stopped by the cops again wish me luck."

That's the message Chris Rock paired with a selfie on Monday, capturing what is apparently the third time in just seven weeks the comedian has been pulled over by police. It's not known why police stopped Rock during these three separate incidents, but the succinct caption alone sums up what's clearly a routine event for him as a black man in America driving what we can assume is a nice car."
http://m.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2015/04/chris-rock-selfies-police%20

Very real. I am the only member of my family who hasn't been profiled by law enforcement (as far as I know...)

“Twitter’s New “Quality Filter” Starts Rolling Out To Verified iOS Users”

“The quality filter isn’t a radical new tool—it is basically an extension of another feature for verified users called tailored filtering, which let them select an edited version of their notifications timeline based on factors like which other users they had the most interactions with. Quality filter basically extends that functionality to all notification options.

rom a strategic standpoint, it makes sense that Twitter is making the feature available first for verified users, since those are usually the people with the most followers (and therefore the most trolls). Non-verified users, however, also have to cope with bullying, which the company has acknowledged by rolling out new anti-harassment tools since the end of last year.

These include a feature that makes it easier for people to report abuse to law enforcement and a suite of tools designed to make it faster to report different kinds of harassment, especially for users on Twitter’s mobile apps. The platform is also trying to cull serial trolls by tracking their phone numbers (though that solution is less than ideal because you don’t need to supply your phone number to open a new account).

As TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez noted last week, until recently Twitter has been more reactive than proactive in terms of dealing with bullying, but several high profile incidents (including #gamergate, the harassment of Robin William’s daughter after his death, and Ashley Judd’s decision to press charges against trolls) have thrown the issue into the spotlight and forced the company to take new steps to ensure the safety of its users.”

http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/23/twitter-quality-filter/

"From a legacy: End preferential treatment"

"Critics of this opinion piece will argue that ending legacy considerations in the admission process will hurt the University’s ability to raise money, since most money is raised through alumni connections. This argument is divorced from reality. MIT ended its preferential policy in 2006 and saw virtually no financial consequences... For non-legacies, this will level the playing field and make the process appear more legitimate, ending a seemingly aristocratic process. For legacy students, this will put an end to the sometimes present latent animus that they were admitted through no fault of their own. Moreover, legacy students who attend Stanford, but would have been denied if they were not a legacy, will end up worse off. Students matriculate in colleges where they will be a good fit, and if the Admission Office admits someone who did not truly belong at Stanford, that will ultimately ruin the student’s undergraduate experience."
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/01/20/from-a-legacy-end-preferential-treatment/

“Jon Ronson’s ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’”

“Ronson’s new book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” digs into a strange phenomenon of the participatory ­Internet. From time to time, it seems as if every user of social media rises up as one to ­denounce, shame and remove an apparently deserving victim. The first few times Ronson witnessed this, he was intrigued — even exhilarated. “When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool,” he writes of his initial reaction: “The silenced were ­getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice.” Or was it? His view turned gradually darker…

Public shamings are often described in this book in terms of physical violence… It so happens that I have been ganged up on online, and I have also been beaten up by actual gangs of men on the street. The actual beating is — surprise! — exponentially worse. Eliding any difference between words and deeds may seem natural to a non-American like Ronson (many European nations have laws against hate speech), but it makes the continuing argument in this country about how to handle offensive language more challenging…

What are the actual stakes of shaming? Lurking and somewhat ­underdocumented in the tales gathered here is the fact that as agonizing as these experiences are, men often survive them just fine. Of the 69 people arrested in a Kennebunk, Maine, prostitution sting, Ronson points out, it was the lone female client who was mocked in town…

the actual problem with the Internet isn’t us hastily tweeting off about foolish people. The actual problem is that none of the men running those bazillion-dollar Internet companies can think of one single thing to do about all the men who send women death threats.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/books/review/jon-ronsons-so-youve-been-publicly-shamed.html

Yes.  I have heard so, so many interviews/excerpts from this book on various podcasts (Jon Ronson is super well connected with the NPR and NPR-diaspora podcasting world), and this is my major concern with the perspective. Or, really, the fact that it’s a white man who is writing this book. I have super complicated feelings about shaming, and I want to do a lot more reading and thinking about it, but there is a lot of overlap with this narrative of sort of the nagging woman, the over-sensitive easily-angered black person, as a foil to the rational and distant white man.

There is a great deal of disambiguation that needs to take place between public shaming and online harassment, based on the person being targeted, the people doing the targeting, and the culture that feels threatened into action.

This is a great moment to be having those conversations, and I am sort of hopeful that we will start to come to better rules for online behavior – a better sense of the ‘why’ and a better sense of the impact, and a better sense of how a group can achieve an intention directly without shaming or harassment but with conversation and communication across barriers of perspective.

Related: Why we blame <add; from 4/22>>

Related: TREVOR NOAH AND THE TOXICITY OF TWITTER

Related: Feminist writers are so besieged by online abuse that some have begun to retire

"And So We Meet, Again: Why The Workday Is So Filled With Meetings"

"The average American office worker spends more than nine hours of every week preparing for, or attending, project update meetings, according to the results of a survey released last week by the software firm Clarizen and Harris Poll. That's up nearly 14 percent from the last survey four years ago.

Experts say poorly run meetings grind away at employee engagement and make companies less reactive by bogging decisions down in human red tape. Some companies, including Mattel, try to create limits around the size, duration or frequency of meetings.

But meetings often last longer than they need to, Rogelberg says, because managers don't understand Parkinson's Law. This is the idea, backed up by research, that tasks take as long as the time allotted. If you budget two hours, it takes two hours...

He says meetings alleviate the anxiety of making tough calls by delaying decisions, instead of making them.

Bad meetings also recur because, in many cases, the people leading them don't know how to run a good one.

There's a lack of self-awareness among meeting leaders. The vast majority self-report that they believe they're conducting meetings well, while the vast majority of participants disagree. Yet Pittampalli says no one speaks up."
http://www.npr.org/2015/01/29/382162271/and-so-we-meet-again-why-the-workday-is-so-filled-with-meetings?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150129

“Autism: reduced connectivity between cortical areas involved in face expression, theory of mind, and the sense of self”

“It is proposed that these two types of functionality, face expression-related, and of one’s self and the environment, are important components of the computations involved in theory of mind, whether of oneself or of others, and that reduced connectivity within and between these regions may make a major contribution to the symptoms of autism… This is the first whole-brain voxel pair-wise analysis of the functional connectivity differences between subjects with autism and controls… The voxel-based analysis described here was especially important because it provided evidence about exactly where the altered functional connectivity was different in autistic subjects compared to controls. By using voxel-based analysis we were able to show for example that areas in the MTG implicated in processing face expression (Critchley et al., 2000), and also other MTG areas implicated in theory of mind (Hein and Knight, 2008), are both implicated as having altered functional connectivity in autism… it is not always sufficiently acknowledged that during the resting state in the magnet with the eyes closed or when looking at a fixation point with no other assigned task, one may well be thinking and mentalizing about one’s plans for the day, other pending activities etc, which will almost always involve thinking about oneself, and about other people, i.e. other selves. The ‘default mode network’ may perhaps with this perspective, be thought of as an ‘inner mentalizing’ network. It may be that this mentalizing process is different in people with autism, who may perform this type of thinking much less, or in a different way (Lai et al., 2014). So we point out that resting state functional MRI in autistic people may help to reveal differences in their brains relative to controls”

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/03/19/brain.awv051

I’m really interested in the brain circuit that is thought to comprise the sort of resting-state sense-of-self, and the suggestions that this is disrupted in several brain disorders.

"Doctors, Prom, and Ellen"

"A high schooler encounters racism when he tries to go to prom"

http://themoth.org/posts/episodes/1503

I am freaking out about the first story in this hour - listen to the short interview afterwards, it's also so, so incredible.
Wow this was a powerful story.
It's what he says at the end, about how he understood that things like Prom were not for people like him - so so so so so so so so so real. SO REAL. America is sort of like 'hi, I'm super accessible, just come over here' but it's really like 'hi, I will let you join in if you can conform and become sort of white and pretend to have no cultural history outside of the US? But I am accessible because anyone who can do that can join in'.

"Five Minutes to Moonflower"

"once you hear it, the idea behind the flower clock is irresistible. First, identify a selection of a few dozen flowers that open and close at regular hours. They can be old friends like lilies, marigolds and primroses. Next, plant them in an organized fashion — perhaps in the segmented shape of a dial or clock face... " what I like about it is it’s so impractical,” he said of Linnaeus’s invention. “One imagines someone waking up in the middle of the night, putting on their dressing gown and then bending over in the garden and smelling the nipplewort and then saying, ‘Wow, it’s late.’ And then going back inside.”"
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/garden/planting-a-clock-that-tracks-hours-by-flowers.html?referrer=

This would be an AWESOME grade school science project. 

"Without Friends or Family, even Extraordinary Experiences are Disappointing"

"This study suggests that the hedonic value we glean from experiences stems not so much from the immediate pleasure they bestow but from the subsequent joy we take in reliving them with others. For many of us, the stories we tell, like those in Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” accrue, through their retelling, added layers of richness unattainable if experienced alone...

Like bits of matter floating in space, humans cluster into communities. These communities serve several purposes: they offer protection and security, they provide resources both physical and emotional, and they give a sense of meaning and belonging. They also hold an arguably even greater power: to actively influence the way we interpret the world."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/without-friends-or-family-even-extraordinary-experiences-are-disappointing/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

I like the thought, though I am not sure if it can be observed through the results of the study.
I think it might have to do with vulnerability, feeling safe enough to be highly impacted by the world

"Chinese scientists genetically modify human embryos"

"In the paper, researchers led by Junjiu Huang, a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, tried to head off such concerns by using 'non-viable' embryos, which cannot result in a live birth, that were obtained from local fertility clinics. The team attempted to modify the gene responsible for β-thalassaemia, a potentially fatal blood disorder, using a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9. The researchers say that their results reveal serious obstacles to using the method in medical applications."
http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-scientists-genetically-modify-human-embryos-1.17378?WT.mc_id=FBK_NatureNews

this is really huge. It's this big line of intentionality that we're crossing. And it's making me think about a lot of things - not just the ethical questions, but the cultural question of what science we are able to do in different societies. The fact that the highest-impact journals are firmly in Western culture, what does that mean about cultrual control of science?

And I am also realizing how much I am already putting this on 'China', how the nationality of the scientists was placed in the headline, how there is already distancing language here so that we don't have to feel complicit if we're willing to be a little racist.

"Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow"

"A woman decides whether she's a wig person or a scarf person while undergoing chemotherapy."

http://themoth.org/posts/stories/hair-today-gone-tomorrow-2

This is a metaphor for like everything, ever, all the things. How to carry an identity in the world, and how much of it is really other's reactions and managing those before you can even deal with it yourself. How sometimes people stop treating you like an individual.

#ReadingIntoThings

“1.5 Million Missing Black Men”

“They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million, according to an Upshot analysis. For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity.

African-American men have long been more likely to be locked up and more likely to die young, but the scale of the combined toll is nonetheless jarring. It is a measure of the deep disparities that continue to afflict black men — disparities being debated after a recent spate of killings by the police — and the gender gap is itself a further cause of social ills, leaving many communities without enough men to be fathers and husbands…

The gender gap does not exist in childhood: There are roughly as many African-American boys as girls. But an imbalance begins to appear among teenagers, continues to widen through the 20s and peaks in the 30s. It persists through adulthood.”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html?abt=0002&abg=0

This is short, but full of so many implications, and likely to be widely referenced.

Race/racism can be so gendered. At Princeton, the ratio of black women to black men was 4:1 (tbh, can’t remember looking at the actual numbers, but I remember lots of people pulling out that stat).

It’s like, I am perceived as not-quite-black way more often than my brothers are.

“The science of blame: Why we respond to tragedies all wrong”

“it seems like the blame ends at Lubitz. Then why do we keep looking for answers and trying to hold others responsible?

Our impulse to blame is strong, but it's also complicated and imperfect. Cognitive psychology tells us that following a negative event our impulse to blame has both an emotional "why" component driven by anger and sadness, and a more rational "who or what is going to make sure this doesn't happen again" set in motion by anxiety and fear. These processes are closely related and often at cross-purposes. Punishing someone for a past event doesn't always make it more likely we can prevent bad events in the future. Conversely, making things safer in the future doesn't always give us the vindication of punishment. Having a better understanding of why we blame and what we're seeking when we do can perhaps get to a more satisfactory — and productive — end…

The impulse to "fix" the problem so it doesn't happen again is a natural one. But it is unclear whether it is a wise one.

"The result is you wind up with laws that are hyper-reactive to situations," explains Solan. "The traditional notion of Madisonian republicanism is precisely because if you do things too quickly, in reaction to immediate situations, you'll respond to blame impulse and not more contemplative pragmatic ideas."”

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/14/8400093/germanwings-blame

"What's Killing Poor White Women?"

"For work, people drive to the college town of Batesville, about 20 minutes south, which has a chicken-processing plant that periodically threatens to close and an industrial bakery with 12-hour shifts that make it hard for a mother to raise children. Less than 13 percent of county residents have a bachelor’s degree. Society is divided into opposites: Godly folk go to church and sinners chase the devil, students go to college and dropouts seek hard labor, and men call the shots and women cook for them...Crystal dropped out in the tenth grade because she had married. That was the way things were. None of Crystal’s siblings finished high school. Instead, they became adults when they were teenagers. Crystal would spend the rest of her years as a housewife to a husband who soon became ill and as a mother to a daughter who would grow up as fast as she did. 

Researchers have long known that high-school dropouts like Crystal are unlikely to live as long as people who have gone to college. But why would they be slipping behind the generation before them? James Jackson, a public-health researcher at the University of Michigan, believes it’s because life became more difficult for the least-educated in the 1990s and 2000s. Broad-scale shifts in society increasingly isolate those who don’t finish high school from good jobs, marriageable partners, and healthier communities...

Something less tangible, it seems, is shaping the lives of white women in the South, beyond what science can measure. Surely these forces weigh on black women, too, but perhaps they are more likely to have stronger networks of other women. Perhaps after centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, black women are more likely to feel like they’re on an upward trajectory. Perhaps they have more control relative to the men in their communities. In low-income white communities of the South, it is still women who are responsible for the home and for raising children, but increasingly they are also raising their husbands. A husband is a burden and an occasional heartache rather than a helpmate, but one women are told they cannot do without."

http://prospect.org/article/whats-killing-poor-white-women

This longread tells the story of Crystal, a poor white woman who died unexpectedly in 2013, and her family. The narrative is interspersed with studies exploring the link between rural poverty and decreasing life expectancies, and some conjectures from the author and people in Crystal's community.

I wanted the piece about race to be addressed differently, maybe from a few non-white perspectives too?, but otherwise this drew me into a very different world from my own and illustrated these really complex public health challenges.

"Marc Andreessen teaches startups what disruption is really about (in 17 tweets)"

“12/Rich people always had books, music, clean clothes, etc.; disruptive innovation made these things available to many more people.”

http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/02/marc-andreessen-teaches-startups-what-disruption-is-really-about-in-17-tweets/

Interesting. It only looks at the first-level effects though, really. Like, Uber might make cab rides cheaper in the short run for the consumer, but what does it do in the long run to the taxi industry and for the Uber drivers themselves (and for the public transportation system, which might lose customers to Uber but still needs to serve the people who can’t afford Uber).

So, does this mean that Uber isn’t a disruptive innovation if it might preserve the status quo in the long term?

"The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing And Briefly Saved Lives"

"So Semmelweis hypothesized that there were cadaverous particles, little pieces of corpse, that students were getting on their hands from the cadavers they dissected. And when they delivered the babies, these particles would get inside the women who would develop the disease and die... So he ordered his medical staff to start cleaning their hands and instruments not just with soap but with a chlorine solution. Chlorine, as we know today, is about the best disinfectant there is. Semmelweis didn't know anything about germs. He chose the chlorine because he thought it would be the best way to get rid of any smell left behind by those little bits of corpse."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150112

It's so true that to accomplish change you can't just be correct, you also have to understand the people and the system and how to interact positively with it.

"There’s An Unlicensed “Frozen” App Where You Deliver Anna’s Baby"

"This is happening. You are injecting a Disney Princess with a hypodermic needle on your telephone. Perhaps you are on the train."

http://www.buzzfeed.com/danielkibblesmith/let-it-grow-let-it-grooow?s=mobile#.ilZjmg4OW

This is so weird, I'm sorry.

"5 Surprising Reasons Why We Don't Quit Jobs We Hate and How to Overcome Them"

"After teaching over a 1,000 people through The Passion Co. and hearing their career stories, I learned about the real reasons why we do not quit. And they have nothing to do with money.

We don't think we are good enough

Do we deserve a job that makes us happy, brings us meaning and get us out of bed in the morning? Yes we all do. However most of us don't think we are good enough to get our dream job, to live the life our heart desires. Turns out behind every excuse of not quitting lies self-doubt. We blame the job not working out solely on ourselves. We are not smart enough, fast enough, political enough; leaving no room to explore possibility."
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6723436?1424465253

"Does the myth of the solo genius scientist contribute to imposter syndrome?"

"This is why I think the answer to my question is “yes”. I think it’s no accident that I don’t feel especially impostery when I collaborate with someone on genetic analyses, but I do when I collaborate on theoretical work. Women are stereotyped as not being good at math (as far as I know, there is no such stereotype related to molecular work), and so I think that triggers more of the feelings of fraud...In particular, the ability to recognize when you need assistance from others to tackle interesting questions and the ability to establish and maintain successful collaborations are important scientific skills, too, even if they might not be viewed as being as important as sheer brilliance."

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2015/01/18/does-the-myth-of-the-solo-genius-scientist-contribute-to-imposter-syndrome/

Interesting. I am really, really bad and defensive about asking for help, especially in certain topics where all the stereotype threat lives, because I feel like if I am really a smart science person shouldn't I be able to do all this on my own? Or perhaps, more accurately, if I am getting help with something then I fear that someone else can come up and point to that as the reason for my success.

I think this imposter syndrome is something that can make it hard to work with men and especially white men in some environments, because they behave in a way that they definitely wouldn't if they realized what fears they were exacerbating.

"The Brain On 23"

"We are 23, and hangovers hurt now. Most of our conversations these days center on assuring one another we are going to be okay. We are proud of each other but hard on ourselves. When a friend does something as simple as cooking a food more complex than pasta, we applaud her, yet we berate ourselves for not yet having a corner office or a bestselling memoir or a thriving startup.

We dance all night to Taylor Swift because she understands. We love who we want, and we hate labels. We are not in college anymore, and we've just become too old to crash their parties. Everyone we know no longer lives on the same block, and we long for the days of running back and forth between houses at 1 a.m. We have few obligations, yet we are always stressed, wondering if life will ever be more certain...

Things don't just fall into place. We have to put them there, and we feel like every second we spend streaming movies from our bedrooms is a second we are not putting ourselves out there. Yet we stream on."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/molly-sprayregen/the-brain-on-23_b_6046888.html

This is perfect. It was going around like 6 months ago, yes, but I was busy then and now I'm looking 24 in the face and I figured I would finally read it. And it perfectly captures all the contradictions of this stage of life.

(the video at the end is an interview that doesn't really add anything)

Related: The Space Between Families