"Why Are Our Parks So White?"

"The national parks attracted a record 292.8 million visitors in 2014, but a vast majority were white and aging. The most recent survey commissioned by the park service on visitation, released in 2011, found that 22 percent of visitors were minorities, though they make up some 37 percent of the population.
This suggests an alarming disconnect. The Census Bureau projects that the country will have a majority nonwhite population by 2044. If that new majority has little or no relationship with the outdoors, then the future of the nation’s parks, and the retail and nonprofit ecosystem that surrounds them, will be in trouble...

In the 2011 park service survey, nonwhites were more than three times as likely as whites to say that the parks provided poor service and were not safe to visit.

And those responses were from nonvisitors, which means that perceptions had congealed into reality among what should be an important constituency for the parks...

The National Park Service is the logical leader to blaze a trail to racial diversity in the natural world. It has a high public profile, and its approaching centennial can serve as a platform for redefinition...

Such a campaign could include educational programs about the importance of the outdoors to a healthy lifestyle, transportation solutions for carless urban dwellers, and advice on easy and safe ways to enjoy the parks."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/diversify-our-national-parks.html?emc=edit_th_20150712&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=8017714&_r=0&referrer=

Making this country for everyone.

"Key & Peele Sketch Imagines A World Where Teachers Are Paid Like Athletes And It’s Awesome"

"it imagines a world in which teachers are treated the same way (and paid the same) as pro athletes are now via a version of SportsCenter centered on teachers."
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andyneuenschwander/key-peeles-latest-sketch-is-a-must-see-for-teachers-everywhe?utm_term=.clQOeOaPk#.nqzRD2YkO

This is way too real. Like, the experience of watching it is a visceral experience of how absurd the world is.

"Finding my Way Black"

"I was not innocent when it came to perpetuating racism. When my friends asked me what my type was, I would say, “I like white guys,” bragging at the end, “I’ve never hooked up with a black guy!” I, too, referred to the group of black students at my high school as “the ghetto clique", even though their parents lived in mansions and drove luxury cars. I would roll my eyes when a black kid acted up in class, but laugh when the white kids did. I came up with wittier answers for questions my friends had like, “Duh I’m wearing sunscreen, what do you want me looking like a Nigerian by the end of summer?” or, “I’m not close with my dad’s side of the family so I’m not really black.”

But the truth is I was Black; and I was treated as such whether I wanted to believe that or not. I was always the one getting reprimanded for talking in class, and in college I was even arrested for drinking while my white friends, who were with me and also drunk, weren’t. My mom finally said to me, “Alyssa, you have to be more careful. People are watching you.” “Why, because I’m a young lady?” I asked. “No. Because you’re black.” What! No I wasn’t! If only they know me, they would know I was an upstanding citizen, a sweet and lovable girl-- they would know I was the opposite of black! At that moment I was faced with my reality, and I knew I could no longer deny it. Black. I’m not black, I’m mixed. I’m better than black. Yes, I am a step above the worst possible thing I could be: colorist, instead of racist, yes that’s what I was; because mixed, although part of my identity, was a lie. I am not mixed because to say I am mixed is to say I am not black. And I am black. I am white, and Japanese, but I am black, and now I am proud...

I had to grapple with guilt, and I had to let go of a new type of anger that arose when I realized how the world had kept me down."
http://theodysseyonline.com/vcu/finding-my-way-black/271026

mmmmmm. mmmmmmmmmm

Related: Other essay; Friendship Race and Knowing Your Place

"WORDS FOR CUTTING: WHY WE NEED TO STOP ABUSING “THE TONE ARGUMENT”"

"Intentions are not magic, but they are data. They give you useful information about why a microaggression or some other harm happened in the first place, provide clues as to how it might be prevented in the future, and yield guidance on how to educate the person who committed the harm or how best to heal the person who was harmed. There is a world of difference, for instance, between dealing with a 4chan troll trying to ruin your life and someone who uses the word “tranny” because they think it sounds cute. Assessing that difference requires some attention to their differing intentions.

The trick is to recognize that you can simultaneously know that intentions do not, in and of themselves, heal wounds while also understanding that they are helpful for assessing the unique contours of the specific conflict you’re addressing. Judgement, in its highest sense, requires attention to what is unique about the case you are judging, not merely how it can be fitted into an abstract framework. If intent cannot be considered at all, then you are denying yourself potentially useful information that could help you better understand the situation.

Put another way, we need a moral framework that provides people with a path for redemption from their mistakes, and fashioning such a path requires an understanding of the intentions at work."
http://feministing.com/2015/04/23/words-for-cutting-why-we-need-to-stop-abusing-the-tone-argument/

Everything is data.

There are a lot of other useful thoughts in here.

"Access Denied"

"Once you’re looking for it, you see signs of access panic everywhere. Before election coverage had gathered much speed, Awl pal (and newsletter creator) Laura Olin, who led social media operations for Obama’s 2012 campaign, 
suggested that Twitter would be used by candidates as a sort of press wire: for some stories, or responses, it was easier for a campaign to simply @ an opponent or make a point directly in front of millions of followers. If the post or exchange is sufficiently newsworthy, the press would write about it anyway.

There are situations that used to require the presence of a reporter to write something down and publish it that can now be resolved with a short, colloquial post. For the quick quote-response type of story, a subject has less need to grant access and the reporter has less leverage to demand it. This, it seemed, would change the jobs of both political operatives and reporters alike...

If Trump creates a television spectacle, Fox and MSNBC will likely cut to it, live. It will be discussed thereafter. Networks, despite this, are banding together to complain that Trump is denying them access typical during presidential campaigns; meanwhile, Trump is demanding CNN give $5 million to charity or else he won’t participate in the next debate. The Huffington Post’s July announcement that it would categorize all Trump stories as “entertainment,” keeping them out of the politics section, doesn’t seem to have slowed its coverage. “Donald Trump’s campaign severely restricted journalists’ movements Tuesday night in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, by keeping them in a press pen,” begins a HuffPo storywritten by the site’s senior media reporter and posted in its “Media” section. We won’t take the bait, we scream, neck-deep in red chum...

One’s expectations of fairness and fullness have transferred from editors and producers and their products to engineers and developers and their products. The trick, this time around, is that these products are designed in such a way to reflect such expectations back to the user: we are persuaded that our feeds are our fault, which minimizes the systems through which they are continuously created. (Don’t blame us! Your feed is made of your choices. Choices you make within a framework that we’ve built!) Neutral editors or publications were always an illusion. They’re people, or made of people! Neutral feeds are an even trickier one. They’re the products of systems. Systems designed by people. (Systems within which Roberts’s “parallel intellectual infrastructure” of conservative media is both inevitable and considered part of the big balanced mix.)...

Or, I mean, maybe these conditions will create for audiences a clearer need for stories that the powerful don’t want told, and those audiences will reward these stories with their attention. But predicting that the further empowerment of the powerful will actually result in greater accountability, rather than just demand it, is maybe a little… optimistic? I mean, maybe social platforms will usher in a new era of investigative reporting and subsequent reform. Or maybe they’re the worst possible place for that! Someone should investigate. Would share."

http://www.theawl.com/2015/12/access-denied

First of all, I lovvveeeee this author's writing style. Read the tags too, at the very bottom above the comments. 

This is really interesting and important and its convincing me that this is an even more pressing problem than I had thought it was: the question of media falling apart, and the new ways that we access information.

I am very interested in the idea of curation, and proper curation, of the enormous world of knowledge that is available to all of us. It's absurd to say that because we "can" Google anything or have access to all these public Twitter feeds, we can actually individually do our own research on every topic. We need curators and collectors; we need people to see the gaps in what is available publically, and the gaps in how information is presented (ex. If it all had a specific bias) and we need these people to have structures and incentives to fill these gaps. We need people who will collect all this raw data and turn it into something that is easy to fit into the everyday lives of the people who need that information. And, in the age of the Internet when we passively encounter so much information and media, we really need people who are thinking hard about curation systems. 

I don't want to go back to a world where, like, 3 news channels put themselves in charge of curating information for all Americans. But right now, this is so terrifyingly true, it's these social media and search platforms that were not designed for this and who I frankly don't trust with this responsibility. 

Whoever comes up with the practice and tools for realistic, scalable curation is going to be my superhero.

Related: 2015 is end of Internet, all the other ones...

FB: #MustRead About the theoretical and real-world consequences of the diminishing power of the press - for story subjects, reporters, and consumers "Politicians, corporations and celebrities enjoy different types and measures of power. But the effects of access panic are also noticeable as they relate to the far less powerful: just as publication without the leverage of a captive audience can’t so easily demand to sit down with a reluctant and powerful subject, a reporter might find more resistance from less powerful subjects wary of his publications’ motives...


Cooperation was never the default. But the calculation changes significantly when news outlets have less to offer. A protester might consciously accept the risk of a quote being included in a less sympathetic story if that story is the best or only way to raise awareness for a cause. That same protester, in a world in which the local paper can no more guarantee a large audience than a few dozen sympathetic Twitter users, might tell a reporter who she knows is going to have to write an on-the-one-hand story, or something that would be, in her view, worse—something condescending or racist, for example—to fuck right off. The reporter’s response, that he’s just doing his job (as in the Mizzou incident), will ring hollow, because it demands the protester accept premises about The Press that she might… not. It assumes a situation in which he is able to provide some sort of access to audience and legitimacy; it says, implicitly, that he is about to record history and represent it to the masses, so she’d better let him get her side of the story. This might sound absurd to a subject who came to a protest not because of a story from a publication, but because of a post from an activist on Twitter."

"If Asian Americans saw white Americans the way white Americans see black Americans"

"Anil Dash, an Indian American and co-founder of social media analytics company ThinkUp, put out a series of tweets challenging the thinking behind that trope. Asian Americans aren’t just model minorities, he argues. Data show that they have surpassed white Americans in so many ways that Asian Americans could talk about white Americans as disparagingly as white Americans talk about the country’s black population."
http://qz.com/395207/if-asian-americans-saw-white-americans-the-way-white-americans-see-black-americans/

"Who Controls Your Facebook Feed"

"for all its power, Facebook’s news feed algorithm is surprisingly inelegant, maddeningly mercurial, and stubbornly opaque. It remains as likely as not to serve us posts we find trivial, irritating, misleading, or just plain boring. And Facebook knows it. Over the past several months, the social network has been running a test in which it shows some users the top post in their news feed alongside one other, lower-ranked post, asking them to pick the one they’d prefer to read. The result? The algorithm’s rankings correspond to the user’s preferences “sometimes,” Facebook acknowledges, declining to get more specific. When they don’t match up, the company says, that points to “an area for improvement.”

“Sometimes” isn’t the success rate you might expect for such a vaunted and feared bit of code. The news feed algorithm’s outsize influence has given rise to a strand of criticism that treats it as if it possessed a mind of its own—as if it were some runic form of intelligence, loosed on the world to pursue ends beyond the ken of human understanding...

Facebook’s algorithm, I learned, isn’t flawed because of some glitch in the system. It’s flawed because, unlike the perfectly realized, sentient algorithms of our sci-fi fever dreams, the intelligence behind Facebook’s software is fundamentally human. Humans decide what data goes into it, what it can do with that data, and what they want to come out the other end. When the algorithm errs, humans are to blame. When it evolves, it’s because a bunch of humans read a bunch of spreadsheets, held a bunch of meetings, ran a bunch of tests, and decided to make it better...

But those interactions are only a rough proxy for what Facebook users actually want. What if people “like” posts that they don’t really like, or click on stories that turn out to be unsatisfying? The result could be a news feed that optimizes for virality, rather than quality—one that feeds users a steady diet of candy, leaving them dizzy and a little nauseated, liking things left and right but gradually growing to hate the whole silly game. How do you optimize against that?...

Cox and the other humans behind Facebook’s news feed decided that their ultimate goal would be to show people all the posts that really matter to them and none of the ones that don’t. They knew that might mean sacrificing some short-term engagement—and maybe revenue—in the name of user satisfaction. With Facebook raking in money, and founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg controlling a majority of the voting shares, the company had the rare luxury to optimize for long-term value. But that still left the question of how exactly to do it...

Mosseri’s instinct was right: The news feed algorithm had blind spots that Facebook’s data scientists couldn’t have identified on their own. It took a different kind of data—qualitative human feedback—to begin to fill them in."
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/01/how_facebook_s_news_feed_algorithm_works.single.html

It's embarrassing how much I care about this.

"10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings"

"Whenever someone gets up from the table and walks around, don’t you immediately respect them? I know I do. It takes a lot of guts but once you do it, you immediately appear smart. Fold your arms. Walk around. Go to the corner and lean against the wall. Take a deep, contemplative sigh. Trust me, everyone will be shitting their pants wondering what you’re thinking. If only they knew (bacon)."
http://thecooperreview.com/10-tricks-appear-smart-meetings/

This is so real. These would actually all work, at least in my experience of an office environment.

Also, just because apparently my brain has to notice these things now, I will point out that all the animated people are white.

"The Indo-Caribbean Experience: Now and Then"

"The first Indians to inaugurate the Indo-Caribbean identity were brought from Calcutta to Guyana as indentured laborers subsequent to the official abolition of slavery in 1838, with many belonging to some of the lowest designations of the Indian social system.

While a sizable percentage of the laborers, commonly called coolies, were recruited from the (modern) northern Madhya Pradesh and Bihar regions, many Indians also came from the Tamil and Telegu regions of South India. Our history books equip us with the term "recruitment" for characterizing the colonial transfer of Indians to the British West Indies, however, it is noteworthy to highlight that many Indians were "recruited" by means such as kidnapping or being placed into forced detention. These were practices that resulted from the realization of the desperate need to replace lost slave labor in an expedient manner subsequent to the abolition of slavery.

Women were the most vulnerable to this form of "recruitment" and many were commonly used by their European managers for sex while working on plantations. Some laborers were able to achieve repatriation. Many, however, never returned home again.

Upon their arrival in Guyana, the Indians were met with great hostility from the existing working class of newly freed slaves in Guyana.

"Do not speak to the Indians," said the British to the Africans. "They are vile and carry diseases." Accordingly, the first Indo-Guyanese dwelled in isolated communities where they were identically indoctrinated to despise their new countrymen...

my identity carries with it the weight of two migrations. A double diaspora. The first undertaken by forced detention, the second by way of a stamped visa...

Trauma begins with the brutal transfer of Indians to the West Indies and re-emerges when their progeny seek to strike their relevance from their identities."

http://www.browngirlmagazine.com/2015/12/the-indo-caribbean-experience-now-and-then/

Heyyyy it's some of my heritage. Joy.

This is a beautiful essay.

"Unmarried Women Now Drive America’s Fertility Trends, And They’re Having Fewer Kids"

"Because America increasingly depends on unmarried women—not married women—to drive its sagging fertility rate.

Twenty years ago the majority of U.S. women of childbearing age were married women. Today, the majority (58%) are unmarried, according to the CDC.

“It’s really what the unmarried segment is doing that is going to drive the overall rate,” says Sally Curtin, a CDC demographer and health statistician."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-REB-33447

Hmm

"The Rise and Fall of .Ly"

"Syria is by no means alone as a complicated country in control of a catchy .com alternative. Montenegro is responsible for .me addresses -- popular for personal portfolios, and also with Facebook, which now owns fb.me. Libya licenses every url that ends in .ly: embed.ly, crowd.ly, Adf.ly, Ow.ly, and all the the “bit.ly” links shortened by Bit.ly. 

The nation of Tuvalu licensed their suffix, “.tv”, to Verisign in exchange for$10 million up front, and $2.2 million annually. That annual fee makes up about 10% of the small island government’s total revenue. Tuvalu’s government has literally paved their streets with domain name money. The coincidence that their country name’s international abbreviation is an English-language pun has become, arguably, their most valuable resource.

How did such a system come about? And is it here to stay?...

In 1997, the IANA under Postel granted authority for .ly to somebody named Kalil Elwiheshi. Despite actually residing in England, Elwiheshi provided, with his application, an address in Tripoli, Libya’s capital. At the time, the IANA did not have the resources to find Elwiheshi out, so he became the technical manager of .ly’s registry.

“A British company [...] acted as collector of registration fees for .ly,”Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace documents, “which it split with [Elwiheshi]. Such arrangements were not at all uncommon with other developing country ccTLDs.”

In April 2004, some 12,400 domains ending in .ly disappeared. The British company managing it had disappeared, too, and for a time nobody knew what to do. According to Bridle, “some but not all” of the domains came back online within a few days, and one “Dr. Hosni Tayeb” sent a cryptic email to all domain holders communicating, in broken English, that everything was fine: “Thank you very much for your concern about .ly cc TLD. People do care around!""

http://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-ly/

This was super interesting!

It also makes important points about the physicality of the internet and its subtle reliance on geopolitics.

(Credit to JL)

“Inviting Patients To Help Decide Their Own Treatment”

“In many hospitals and clinics around the country, oncologists and surgeons simply tell cancer patients what treatments they should have, or at least give them strong recommendations.  But here, under a formal process called “shared decision making,” doctors and patients are working together to make choices about care.

It might seem like common sense:  Each patient has different priorities and preferences; what’s right for one patient may be wrong for another.  Of course patients should weigh in. But many aren’t accustomed to speaking up. Even the most engaged or educated patients may defer to their doctors because they are scared, they don’t want to be seen as difficult or they think the doctor knows best.

For their part, not all doctors want to cede control to patients who have far less medical knowledge or who may be relying on information they got from friends and the Internet. Also, many physicians don’t have the time for long discussions and the health care system isn’t set up to pay for them.”

http://kaiserhealthnews.org/news/inviting-patients-to-help-decide-their-own-treatment/?utm_source=Innovators+Insights+Newsletter&utm_campaign=becad888b4-Innovators_Insights_April_2_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_171b83f6b5-becad888b4-247503881

".io - British Indian Ocean Territory"

"The Chagos had a population of some two thousand inhabitants, known as Ilois - French creole for “islanders” - or Chagossians, who had lived on the islands, first as slaves and later as free plantation workers, for generations. Although they knew no other home, they could not be allowed to remain on the islands.

The British attitude to the Chagossians was articulated in a diplomatic cable of 1966 which dismissively referred to them as“some few Tarzans or Men Fridays”, and over the next few years they were forcibly removed from the islands and dumped on the docks of Mauritius and Seychelles, where most of their descendants still live in poverty today. Their history, and that of the secret deal between the US and Britain to remove them, is told in John Pilger’s film Stealing a Nation.

To add insult to injury, in 2010 the Chagos Marine Protected Area, covering the entirety of the BIOT was declared as “the largest marine preserve in the world”. While it was described by the British government at the time as a move to preserve the unique environment of the Chagos, a diplomatic cablesubsequently released by Wikileaks quoted a British minister declaring that the marine preserve was “the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands' former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling in the BIOT.” A small community of Chagossians in the UKcontinues to fight for their return to the islands, which has been repeatedly blocked by the UK government.

The reason the British Government is so keen to keep the Chagos Archipelago free of Chagossians is the same as it was in 1964: to preserve its use as a US military base...

None of this history is visible from .io, which was assigned to Internet Computer Bureau Ltd, a small company based in Bournemouth, UK, in 1997."

http://citizen-ex.com/stories/io

Colonialism.io

FB: “the repetition of national politics in virtual space reminds us that our digital lives take place in the context of history and society, subject to the same powers and pressures as our physical lives."

"Universities Are Trying To Teach Faculty How To Spot Microaggressions"

""The term 'microaggression' is really professional jargon that has arisen from research on the subject, and it obviously doesn’t translate well to a popular audience," he added.
The reason schools are doing this, according to University of Illinois urban planning professor Stacy Anne Harwood, is because students are demanding it. Students in recent years have engaged in activism around campus climate issues tied to race and treatment of minorities...
"The reaction is more like, 'Oh, we have to be [politically correct] and 'thought police,' without thinking about well, if your words are harming people and limiting access and contributing to students dropping out and not succeeding," Harwood said. "There is this disconnect.""
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/559ec77be4b096729155bfec?ir=Education

Oh my god. It pisses me off so, so much that people saw this list and immediately perceived it to be a limit of free speech. Why can't a brown person ask a white person to stop being hurtful without that white person freaking out like their civil liberties are being limited??? Why is it everyone's right to be offensive to me, and my responsibility to just take it and avoid making anyone uncomfortable with my emotions???
I think about this sometimes- in kindergarten, we were taught that sometimes people would do things we didn't want them to be doing, and to react by turning to them and saying "I don't like that, please stop that." But we were not taught that sometimes we would be the ones doing the wrong thing, even if we didn't think what we were doing was wrong, and we were not taught to have a moment of self-critical thought. So there are some people who still respond with a sneer and a tantrum.

"How Asian-American Voters Went From Republican To Democratic"

"When she first became a citizen, she voted for the Republican presidential candidate.

"I remember I did vote for Reagan," she said at a Vietnamese mini mall that offers everything from jasmine rice to jade jewelry. "Reagan was my hero because many Vietnamese at the time, we were very much victims of communism."

But, she said, the party has changed.

"I think the Republican has gone too far to the right, and they are not the Republicans of the Reagans anymore," she said.

But voter concerns have changed, too. It's not communism that Vietnamese voters are worried about; these days, Nguyen said, they're concerned about jobs, affordable health care and the economy."

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/09/16/439574726/how-asian-american-voters-went-from-republican-to-democratic

"Disrupting Domesticity: Mental Illness & Love as a Fact"

"My brain was great at taking whatever twisted path necessary to come to the conclusion every bad thing that happened to me was my fault. It gave me a semblance of control, even if it wasn’t entirely real or based on the truth. By this point, I’d read enough books to know that my incessant crying and panic attacks were symptoms of a real problem. Still, I was scared to tell. No one “got help” in my family. I didn’t tell anyone who could actually help me until I turned eighteen and could sign up for sessions with a therapist without my mother’s consent. Since then I’ve been clinically diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and PTSD...

That’s really all the background you need to understand Kelly’s answers to these questions (from you!) about living with someone who has a mental illness (like me). I’ve taken the questions that were suggested and personalized them. I also interject into his responses from time to time to offer a little more context. Read away"
http://the-toast.net/2015/07/08/disrupting-domesticity-5/

"A study of California prosecutors finds a lack of diversity"

"Prosecutors decide whether to bring a case before a grand jury, how hard to press for an indictment, what charges to request and how punitive a sentence to recommend. Grand juries almost never refuse to file the charges prosecutors request. And mandatory sentencing laws often allow prosecutors to determine the penalty by picking the charges.

Moreover, the vast majority of criminal cases in the United States end in plea bargains, not in trials. So the discretion exercised in our justice system is mostly not by judges but by prosecutors, and typically not by elected district attorneys but by the legions of far less visible lawyers they employ.

Who are they? How representative are assistant district attorneys and deputy district attorneys of the communities they serve? For the most part, the answer is “we don't know.” Race and gender statistics for police officers have been publicly available for decades, but nothing similar has existed for prosecutors."
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0729-sklanskymukamal-diversity-prosecutors-california-20150729-story.html

"Empathy Cards For Serious Illness"

"I created this collection of empathy cards for serious illness because I believe we need some better, more authentic ways to communicate about sickness and suffering. “Get well soon” cards don’t make sense when someone might not. Sympathy cards can make people feel like you think they’re already dead. A “fuck cancer” card is a nice sentiment, but when I had cancer, it never really made me feel better. And I never personally connected with jokes about being bald or getting a free boob job, which is what most “cancer cards” focus on.

With Empathy Cards, my goal is to help people connect with each other through truth and insight, which is one of the founding principles of this brand. I want the recipients of these cards to feel seen, understood, and loved."
http://info.emilymcdowell.com/empathy-cards-for-serious-illness/#sthash.SuL7CGjR.dpuf

I love this!

"How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood"

"Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies...

Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness...

And now, they have a terrific advantage in their efforts to produce their own content: Netflix has created a database of American cinematic predilections. The data can't tell them how to make a TV show, but it can tell them what they should be making. When they create a show like House of Cards, they aren't guessing at what people want...

The human language of the genres helps people identify with the recommendations. "Predicting something is 3.2 stars is kind of fun if you have an engineering sensibility, but it would be more useful to talk about dysfunctional families and viral plagues. We wanted to put in more language," Yellin said. "We wanted to highlight our personalization because we pride ourselves on putting the right title in front of the right person at the right time.""
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/

Ohhhh, that's why their shows are so good.

"The Family That Couldn’t Say Hippopotamus"

"Coming out of an era of rapid advances in computer technology, the idea of a discrete, common origin to human language made intuitive sense. It was also consistent with observations that many languages have similar features, suggesting that the brain contains a limited array of linguistic “switches” that constrain the ways language develops. These narrow paths, according to the theory, give rise to universal language structures. In sentences that contain a verb and object, for instance (“Duane played the piano”), a preposition often precedes a noun (“at the party”).

But over the years, it became clear that the truth about language origins was not quite as simple as a “language gene” or well-defined language module. Further study revealed that the FOXP2 gene is relevant to multiple mental abilities and is not strictly a language gene at all... As Enard points out, the language-as-island idea is also inconsistent with the way evolution typically works. “What I don’t like about the ‘module’ is the idea that it evolved from scratch somehow. In my view, it’s more that existing neural circuits have been adapted for language and speech.”...
Even the advancement of general cognitive skill, however, may be too narrow a picture of the evolution of language. University of Edinburgh computational linguist Simon Kirby argues that, while the human brain may be a necessary foundation for language, it is not sufficient to explain it. The beginnings of language, Kirby says, were profoundly shaped by the dynamic interplay of human culture itself... As hardwired as it is, language is a distributed object, both across the human brain and across generations of people."

http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/the-family-that-couldnt-say-hippopotamus-rp

I feel like there are a lot of human traits that wouldn't exist in isolation.

"I Don't Know What to Do With Good White People"

"This faded report is the type of official document a historian might consult if he were re-constructing the story of my family. The author, this white welfare officer, writes as if she is an objective observer, but she tells a well-worn story of Black women who refuse to work and instead depend on welfare. Occasionally, her clinical tone breaks down. Once, she notes that my mother is pretty. She probably considered herself a good white person...

Most of my white friends have responded to recent events with empathy or outrage. Some have joined protests. Others have posted Criming While White stories, a hashtag that has been criticized for detracting from Black voices. Look at me, the hashtag screams, I know that I am privileged. I am a good white person. Join me and remind others that you are a good white person too.

Over the past two weeks, I've seen good white people congratulate themselves for deleting racist friends or debating family members or performing small acts of kindness to Black people. Sometimes I think I'd prefer racist trolling to this grade of self-aggrandizement. A racist troll is easy to dismiss. He does not think decency is enough. Sometimes I think good white people expect to be rewarded for their decency...

I don't know which is worse, the unrepentant killer or the man who insists to the end that he meant well...

I don't think Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo set out to kill Black men. I'm sure the cops who arrested my father meant well. But what good are your good intentions if they kill us?"

http://jezebel.com/i-dont-know-what-to-do-with-good-white-people-1671201391?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

I love when someone summarizes my feelings.

I know that in other ways, I am a good-privileged-person. And I think it helps a lot to be on both sides of this because, really, the issue is remembering that it's not about you. The issue is that people are not acting in recognition of the fact that other people are in pain; they are acting in recognition of the fact that they need to acknowledge certain things in order to keep seeming "good".

The thought process isn't "what does X group need from the systems that I have privilege in? What do individuals in my life need from me?", instead it's "What can I do? How will people see me if I do that?"

FB: "What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life...

"You know what? He means well," we say. We lean on this, and the phrase is so condescending, so cloyingly sweet, so hollow, that I'd almost rather anyone say anything else about me than how awful I am despite how good I intend to be."