"Physicists at the Gate: Collaboration and Tribalism in Science"

"as physicists sink their teeth into the data, many are finding that entering another field is not simple. As Bettencourt puts it: “Physicists come at it and say, ‘What’s wrong with these people, biologists and social scientists? There’s all this data … Why don’t you just look at the data and see what it tells you about these systems?’

“People who are in these disciplines and have been educated in them, and have worked in them for a long time, feel like the barbarians are at the gate,” Bettencourt says. “Here come the physicists who don’t understand the concepts that people have been dealing with —  and start saying things nobody asked for.”... 

if the non-physicists are testy about these collaborations, they have their reasons. The patterns that a newcomer uncovers may be ones that people in the field have known about for ages. Lynette Shaw, a sociologist who also trained in physics, notes that without learning about the journey of thought and argument that a field has been through, it’s all too easy for physicists to reinvent the wheel...

“In a sense, physics is the easy science,” says archaeologist Tim Kohler, who is currently working on a border-crossing collaboration. Or as computer scientist and engineer Danny Hillis wrote years ago, “Physicists have learned the lesson that a very simple theory of what is going on is often correct. Biologists have learned the opposite lesson: Simple mathematical theories of biology are usually wrong.”... 

Recognizing the inherent messiness of fields like animal behavior and anthropology is a better foundation for reaching an understanding, and maybe even making progress together. Many scientists say it takes about a year of sincere, humble talks between collaborators — often over beers — to get to the point where work can actually begin."

https://undark.org/article/collaboration-and-tribalism-in-science/?utm_content=buffer81b5a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

FB: "People who have successfully untangled the lunchroom dynamic, and turned it into more of a conference-room dynamic, have ideas about how to make things better. Many of them come down to unpacking this issue of hierarchy. The idea that some sciences are hard or soft, pure or less pure, is tangled up in more than a century of scientific culture. But probably the most important — and difficult to grapple with — part of it is a reverence for elegance."

"First modern Britons had 'dark to black' skin, Cheddar Man DNA analysis reveals"

"It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.

The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today... 

The results pointed to a Middle Eastern origin for Cheddar Man, suggesting that his ancestors would have left Africa, moved into the Middle East and later headed west into Europe, before eventually crossing the ancient land bridge called Doggerlandwhich connected Britain to continental Europe. Today, about 10% of white British ancestry can be linked to this ancient population."

https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/first-modern-britons-dark-black-skin-cheddar-man-dna-analysis-reveals?__twitter_impression=true

Aaaah what if all the early human inhabitantsof the land that is now Europe were all dark-skinned? I mean, actually, obviously they were. How did I never think about this? 

FB: "Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist at University College London and another member of the project’s team, agreed, saying the connection often drawn between Britishness and whiteness was “not an immutable truth. It has always changed and will change”."

"WHY CLOUDFLARE LET AN EXTREMIST STRONGHOLD BURN"

"A site that someone, somewhere, deeply despises is the type of site that is likely to be attacked. And when sites are attacked, Cloudflare gets better at what it does; its pattern recognition improves. “Putting yourself in front of things that are controversial actually makes the system smarter,” Prince says. “It’s like letting your kids roll around in the dirt.” This is one of the reasons it makes sense for Cloudflare to offer a free self-service platform: By widening the pool of potential invasive agents, it makes the immune system more responsive. “It’s not obvious that a bunch of escorts that aren’t paying you anything are good customers. It’s not obvious that having people who get attacked all the time—including neo-Nazi sites—that you would by default want them to be on your network. But we’ve always thought the more things we see, the better we’re able to protect everybody else.”... 

In early May, another story came out—one that Cloudflare could not ignore. The article, by ProPublica, revealed that people who had complained to Cloudflare about the Daily Stormer were getting harassing and threatening calls and emails, including one that told the recipient to “fuck off and die.” The ProPublica piece quoted a blog post under Anglin’s name: “We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us. We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.” It looked as if Cloudflare had ratted out decent people to an army of fascist trolls.

Recognizing that it had a legitimate problem on its hands that couldn’t be erased by invoking free speech, Cloudflare quickly altered its abuse policy, giving users the option of not forwarding their identity and contact information. ProPublica also reported Anglin saying that the hate site paid $200 a month for its Cloudflare protection, a point Cloudflare would not comment on. Despite Cloudflare’s pride in protecting any site, no matter how heinous, Prince says he was caught off guard by the Daily Stormer’s attacks on the people who complained. “What we didn’t anticipate,” Prince told me, ruefully, “was that there are just truly awful human beings in the world.”

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/

"An aquarium accident may have given this crayfish the DNA to take over the world"

"The marbled crayfish is the only decapod crustacean that reproduces asexually, with the all-female species making clones of itself from eggs unfertilized by sperm. It has been thought to have arisen when two slough crayfish, imported from Florida for the aquarium trade in Germany, mated.

Since its discovery in 1995 in Germany, the marbled crayfish has spread across Europe and into Africa in huge numbers. “They eat anything—rotten leaves, snails or fish broods, small fish, small insects," says Frank Lyko, a molecular geneticist at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. “This crayfish is a serious pest,” adds Gerhard Scholtz, an evolutionary biologist at Humboldt University in Berlin, who has tracked its rapid spread across the globe, including Madagascar, where its success threatens the existence of the seven crayfish native to that island country. The European Union banned the species: It must not be sold, kept, distributed, or released to the wild.

Five years ago, Lyko became interested in the marbled crayfish, now called Procambarus virginalis, because he thought its newly evolved asexual nature might parallel how a normal cell turns cancerous and begins generating clones of itself. In particular, he wanted to study the genomes of marbled crayfish to uncover basic mechanisms underlying epigenetics, the binding of molecules to DNA that can drive tumor growth and help cancer spread."

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/aquarium-accident-may-have-given-crayfish-dna-take-over-world?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=crayfish-17725

"The Beholden Age of Television"

"Anyway, shouldn’t we be worried about the kind of TV getting made, as opposed to the volume of it? What happens to the sitcoms and dramas themselves when they need, more than ever, to stand out from the crowd? They force you to care more, taking TV from passive pleasure to academic exercise, which is to say an insipid puzzle. From Lost to Westworld to Stranger Things, producers cater to obsessive, breathless, toxic fans, establishing a mutually hostile partnership with half-assed clues or allusions that are always less important than presented in a “constellation of dedicated blogs and podcasts and vaguely frightening subreddits where shut-ins advance bizarre theories about minor plot points.” Thank god that Twin Peaks, at least, refuses ultimate answers.

But we’re stuck in a world where people watch sped-up versions of the hottest sagas on HBO just to stay in the loop. Like speed-reading, the practice betrays an indifference to mood or craft, stripping the substance down to its spoilers. You may as well read the Wikipedia summary, and that’s what the garbage shows of peak TV become: their own synopses. Each scene is maximized for the required release of information and to forward yet another argument for watching in the first place."

https://medium.com/s/bad-art/the-beholden-age-of-television-13b45256a040

"Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read"

"In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.

Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it. But even before the internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves. You don’t need to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever... 

“[In the dialogue] Socrates hates writing because he thinks it’s going to kill memory,” Horvath says. “And he’s right. Writing absolutely killed memory. But think of all the incredible things we got because of writing. I wouldn’t trade writing for a better recall memory, ever.” Perhaps the internet offers a similar tradeoff: You can access and consume as much information and entertainment as you want, but you won’t retain most of it."

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/what-was-this-article-about-again/551603/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20180126&silverid=Mzg1NDYyNDA3OTU2S0

"Dopamine may have given humans our social edge over other apes"

"Compared with other primates, both humans and great apes had elevated levels of serotonin and neuropeptide Y, in the basal ganglia. However, in line with another recent study on gene expression, humans had dramatically more dopamine in their striatum than apes, they report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Humans also had less acetylcholine, a neurochemical linked to dominant and territorial behavior, than gorillas or chimpanzees. The combination “is a key difference that sets apart humans from all other species,” Raghanti says. 

Those differences in neurochemistry may have set in motion other evolutionary changes, such as the development of monogamy and language in humans, theorizes Kent State paleoanthropologist Owen Lovejoy, a co-author. He proposes a new “neurochemical hypothesis for the origin of hominids,” in which females mated more with males who were outgoing, but not too aggressive. And males who cooperated well with other males may have been more successful hunters and scavengers. As human ancestors got better at cooperating, they shared the know-how for making tools and eventually developed language—all in a feedback loop fueled by surging levels of dopamine. “Cooperation is addictive,” Raghanti says"

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/dopamine-may-have-given-humans-our-social-edge-over-other-apes?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=dopamine-17519

Still super frustrating that the only role for females is mating and males are doing complex things. Like, I'm 100% positive that females had a little more to do. But whatever, overall still compelling, we have stronger reward/novelty drives. 

"Nobody Should Be Talking About Beto and Gillum in 2020 Until We Understand Stacey Abrams in 2018"

"This Georgia governor’s race was important and there was a lot of garbage news coverage that needed to be put in check. During the campaign, I had phones hung up on me, two little boy-band “progressives” at The Intercept tried to get access to my emails, and I was threatened with libel. But it was all worth it. In the Abrams campaign I saw Tishaura Jones’ campaign in St. Louis, and Donna Edwards in Maryland and Yvette Simpson in Cincinnati—black women who had to fight against Democrats, white people and sometimes even black men just to compete for offices they were uniquely qualified for... 

As for that elusive white voter that Bernie Sanders and the DNC have been obsessed about since 2016? Take a look at the white vote that Stacey Abrams earned vs. Carter’s 2014 totals in metro Atlanta counties like Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett, as well as her success in rural counties like Chatham and Forsyth (according to internal data from the Abrams campaign)... These are Taylor Swift numbers. These are pumpkin-spice-latte-with-avocado toast-and-raisins numbers. These are the kind of white vote totals most Democrats only dream about. Let’s be honest, if Stacey Abrams were a white woman, or a man, or a black man with these numbers, she’d be one the tip of everyone’s tongue as a 2020 presidential contender or at least a VP pick. So the question remains—how did she lose? Brian Kemp stole the election, of course."

https://www.theroot.com/nobody-should-be-talking-about-beto-and-gillum-in-2020-1831061434?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=theroot_facebook&utm_campaign=top&fbclid=IwAR2ex3F9YSQOssLG44uc7SR4JtE3Z57LeA5MMgRI1GTV5TD3aSVVVvYHIHg

FB:" 'Nationally, Stacey Abrams’ campaign is a template for how Democrats should attack the South, approach turnout and fight voter suppression. Whether the Democratic nominee in 2020 is Biden or Beto, Gillum or Gillibrand, they can’t win if they don’t bring a Stacey to the table as well. I’ll be there to make sure they don’t forget."

"Robust research needs many lines of evidence"

"We believe that an essential protection against flawed ideas is triangulation3. This is the strategic use of multiple approaches to address one question. Each approach has its own unrelated assumptions, strengths and weaknesses. Results that agree across different methodologies are less likely to be artefacts.

Isn’t this how science is meant to operate? Perhaps so, but scientists in today’s hyper-competitive environment often lose sight of the need to pursue distinct strands of evidence.

The problem was aptly described in May 2017, when cancer researcher William Kaelin lamented that the goal of the scientific paper had shifted from testing narrow conclusions in multiple ways to making a broadening series of assertions, each based on limited evidence⁴. Consequently, he said, “papers are increasingly like grand mansions of straw, rather than sturdy houses of brick”... 

An illuminating example is the oft-observed J-shaped curves that chart correlation between a condition and health outcome⁵.

For instance, multiple studies show that people who consume low levels of alcohol are healthier than heavy drinkers and teetotallers, leading several researchers to conclude that moderate alcohol consumption promotes health. But other factors, such as unhealthy people being advised to give up drinking, would explain the same shape. Similarly, repeated observations that being slightly overweight is associated with the highest life expectancy might be explained by illness (including processes leading up to the manifestation of a disease, which itself can result in reduced weight); by physicians treating overweight individuals more aggressively; and by other favourable characteristics of overweight individuals, such as lower smoking rates... 

To support triangulation, we recommend a shift to a contributorship model, similar to the credits that roll at the end of a film — a long list of individuals with their contributions described fully and specifically⁸. This will require academics to potentially forgo ‘senior authorship’ positions. It would also make it easier for early-career researchers to specify their unique contribution to a paper when applying for promotion or another position."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01023-3?utm_source=fbk_nnc&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=naturenews&sf180001996=1

FB:" Triangulation means explicitly choosing analytical approaches that depend on different assumptions. For example, if a woman’s partner smokes during her pregnancy, many of the same confounders apply as in maternal smoking, but the association with lower birth weight is much weaker. Birth weight can also be analysed according to levels of cigarette taxation across US states, which reduces the effects of confounders. And analyses can compare the birth weights of siblings whose mother smoked during one pregnancy but not another.

Mendelian randomization is a technique developed specifically to probe causal relationships. In cohorts grouped according to whether or not people carry a genetic variant associated with greater cigarette consumption in those who smoke, mothers who smoke and carry the variant tended to have babies who weighed less; non-smokers with the same variant did not. Taken together, these studies make it clear that maternal smoking affects birth weight directly⁶."

“True Story”

“Though communicating the Gospel—the “good news”—is always part of our mission, the church doesn’t merely communicate information; it also creates the conditions for personal and communal formation. In this sense, the church is a community of character formed by a Nazarene rabbi whose teachings and practices shape our imaginations and our way of life. Our attempt to live in light of the narrative of all existence originating from God, humankind separating from God by sin, and our restoration to God through Jesus determines the texture of our identities and our moral universe“

https://thepointmag.com/2017/examined-life/true-story

^this paragraph explained Christianity to me better than anything has.

“Nearly 100 scientists spent 2 months on Google Docs to redefine the p-value. Here’s what they came up with”

“the paper is unique for the way it came about: from 100 scientists around the world, from big names to Ph.D. students, and even a few nonacademics writing and editing in a Google document for 2 months...

The diversity among participants was striking, says Lakens, with less prestigious institutes well-represented, and many contributors sharing their personal experiences. Some argued that they could not afford to set up the large studies needed to meet the new standard or were unable to recruit enough study participants. Some said the lower α could force researchers to resort to so-called “convenience samples,” such as undergrad students, or move studies online. Critics also noted that larger studies are less likely to be replicated, and a more stringent α could make researchers more risk-averse and less likely to take on hard questions.

But perhaps the main argument, the participants agreed, was that 0.005 is just as arbitrary as 0.05, and that the threshold depends on what is already known about a topic and the risks associated with getting a wrong answer. One might accept a higher chance of a false positive result in a preliminary study, for instance, whereas a drug trial might require a lower p-value.

Lakens extracted the gist of the discussions in a new Google document that served as the basis for the paper”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/nearly-100-scientists-spent-2-months-google-docs-redefine-p-value-here-s-what-they-came

“White Folks”

“In the early months of 2006, Lensmire returned to Boonendam to interview white folks about their feelings on race. He asked his subjects about their childhoods and families, about the role they thought race played in their own lives and communities, and about contemporary issues of race and racism. He listened but also gently prodded, interceding at strategic moments with a question or challenge. In this way he was able to elicit both the stories as his subjects told them to themselves, and some of the hidden patterns that could emerge only under thoughtfully applied pressure...

This scene, Lensmire suggests, points to a kind of whiteness that arises not only from its hate or fear of blackness—a fear that has all too often been tied, in American history, to fantasies of revenge and violence—but also from the tension between those malignant emotions and an acute awareness of black humanity. “What white people cannot live with,” writes Lensmire, “is their social role as white people in the American drama given that playing this role demands the betrayal of the sacred principle of equality. Wanting to believe in America, freedom, and equality, but confronted with the hard work and uncertainty of democracy as well as with massive inequality all around us, we scapegoat and stereotype people of color.”...

It’s a bit too glib, maybe, to suggest that the development seminars were another version of that magic rite that Lensmire had conducted back in Boonendam, where certain constructions and performances of race serve to temporarily soothe the cognitive dissonance of those whose ideals are routinely betrayed by the power structure from which they benefit. White privilege and supremacy talk is not blackface minstrelsy. But it does not seem unlikely that the prevailing language for theorizing whiteness and white people has evolved to provide psychological benefits to a very particular constituency, within very particular contexts.”

"The Troubling Origins of the Skeletons in a New York Museum"

"He sent an e-mail to Herero descendants he knew in the U.S., including Murangi, and they contacted the museum. The A.M.N.H. stores human bones in two offices and several storage cabinets on the fifth floor. “That’s our most heavily utilized collection,” David Hurst Thomas, a curator of anthropology at the museum who was present for the Namibians’ visit, told me.

Thomas is also the author of “Skull Wars,” a candid and critical history of human-skeleton collections. “We have scientists researching those materials almost on a daily basis,” he added. Many scientific papers in evolutionary biology have cited the von Luschan Collection. Nonetheless, the A.M.N.H. has gradually come to acknowledge the troubling origins of many remains in its possession. The museum does not deny that its Namibian remains, from eight individuals, may include the products of genocide; the bones of two people, collected at an unspecified date, were taken from locations where Germans killed Herero in concentration camps. At least one skull shows damage that may have resulted from violence... 

Museum staff members said they are open to handing over the Namibian remains. But first, descendants will have to decide what they want to happen to them... 

Suzan Harjo, an activist of Cherokee and Muscogee descent who co-wrote the law, remembers museums arguing that they owned human remains. “What we did was change the conversation from property rights to human rights,” she told me. In the inventory work that followed, one of the names that surfaced was Felix von Luschan. On the island of Lanai, Luschan personally dug up more than eighty Native Hawaiian remains, some of which ended up in the A.M.N.H."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-troubling-origins-of-the-skeletons-in-a-new-york-museum?mbid=social_facebook

"Tech Diversity Programs Are Conservative"

"Diversity programs in tech are a bit cruder. They often rely on the idea that issues like sexism can be solved just by having equal number of men and women in high-status occupations like tech. And by celebrating different identities with special events and programs.

To me this is ridiculous. Maybe the number of women in tech is symptom of the industry’s sexism. But even if that’s true, why would adding more women solve that problem?

I once worked in a tech company that had a lot of women. They even won awards for diversity. But the numbers concealed a darker truth. The reality is the women there were harassed and paid less than men who did the same (or lesser jobs). It’s a story I’ve heard repeated numerous times: young idealistic woman excited to join tech company with lots of women and then realizes the place is toxically sexist. On some level I’ve wondered if the diversity programs and stats are just covers for this kind of behavior.

Or to provide a way for companies to benefit by hiring women, both enjoying cheaper labor by paying them less and using them to tout their “diversity” efforts. It’s telling how many “women in tech” events are sponsored by companies in the midst of paygap lawsuits. I have very little interest in being used in this way personally.

https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/tech-diversity-programs-are-conservative-5113ab13666e

Related: HR doesn't help anyone

FB: "The last diversity training I went to ever was one about “implicit bias” which was not just galling because the science behind it was bad but because the office was struggling with explicit bias. But I had to remind myself this wasn’t meant to be effective. It was meant to show they tried, when inevitably someone would sue the company for discrimination."

"Why Is It So Hard for Americans to Get a Decent Raise?"

"The paper—written by José Azar of IESE Business School at the University of Navarra, Ioana Marinescu of the University of Pennsylvania, and Marshall Steinbaum of the Roosevelt Institute—argues that, across different cities and different fields, hiring is concentrated among a relatively small number of businesses, which may have given managers the ability to keep wages lower than if there were more companies vying for talent. This is not the same as saying there are simply too many job hunters chasing too few openings—the paper, which is still in an early draft form, is designed to rule out that possibility. Instead, its authors argue that the labor market may be plagued by what economists call a monopsony problem, where a lack of competition among employers gives businesses outsize power over workers, including the ability to tamp down on pay. If the researchers are right, it could have important implications for how we think about antitrust, unions, and the minimum wage... 

The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission consider a market with an HHI score of 2,500 or more to be highly concentrated—if a merger between two wireless companies left that little competition for cell services, for instance, there’s a good chance the government’s lawyers would challenge it. In their paper, the authors find that America’s local labor markets had a whopping average HHI score of 3,157. Employers also tended to advertise lower pay in cities and towns where fewer businesses were posting jobs—suggesting that the lack of competition among companies was letting them suppress pay."

https://slate.com/business/2018/01/a-new-theory-for-why-americans-cant-get-a-raise.html

Related: democrats adopting antitrust 

FB: fascinating. "This paper’s findings suggest that Washington needs to think more carefully about how mergers can impact the job market, not just on the national level, but in specific cities and towns, where the marriage of two, smaller companies could have a big local impact."

‘Don’t you agree?’

"At some level, Trump seems to know that “the way I feel” isn’t true or good or real. This is why, like everyone trying to live within a lie they partly recognize is unreal, he seeks support and confirmation from others. This is why it was so important for him to say, “Don’t you agree?” The unreality of the lie can appear more real-ish to him if he can persuade others to join him in the fantasy of it.

This question is always present, although usually unspoken, whenever bigoted lies are expressed. It’s the question silently accompanying every racist, misogynist, or homophobic “joke,” every disparaging generalization. This is the constant, perpetual question exchanged among bigots: Don’t you agree?... 

It doesn’t matter if the question has been asked explicitly or implicitly, it requires an explicit response. If you don’t very clearly say “No. No I do not agree because it is not true,” then whatever else you may say or do will be taken as agreement and encouragement. Your voice and your power — however much or however little you may have — will be conscripted in service of that agreement and in service of the lie it prefers to reality."

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/01/15/dont-you-agree/#wS3gyUwFZK9KFQ7D.99

FB: I'm actually going to try this "For disagreement to register, it needs to focus on the substance of the false claim. Not “you really shouldn’t say things like that” but as plainly as possible, “That is not true. Your opinion does not correspond with objective reality.”

"Black Americans suffer most from racial trauma, but few counselors are trained to treat it"

"Hemmings co-authored a recent study, published in the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development this month, that found that the majority of counselors in the United States are not prepared to identify and treat race-based trauma, which often results from racial harassment, discrimination, violence, or experiencing institutional racism.

In addition to this lack of preparation, the study highlighted existing research pointing to a general shortage of professional training opportunities for understanding and treating race-based trauma... 

Not only are people of color disproportionately affected by race-based trauma, they rarely seek counseling, said Audra Lee, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in Pittsburgh.

“People of color don’t feel safe to come to therapy largely because they don’t feel they can find people who can relate to their experience,” Lee told ThinkProgress."

https://thinkprogress.org/black-americans-race-based-trauma-counselors-f60624aa8d0c/

Related: there was at least one related to this

"When Celebrities Talk Science"

"It’s not entirely surprising to see Deschanel — a mid-2000s hipster icon perhaps best known for her role in the Fox sitcom “New Girl” — suddenly talking about food mileage and azodicarbonamide. As many celebrities have discovered, the combination of wellness culture, ethical consumerism, and Hollywood glamor can make for a potent — and profitable — media cocktail. Pioneers of the model include Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, a health and lifestyle brand, Jessica Alba’s Honest Company, and even Tom Brady’s TB12... 

More concerning is the organics episode in which Deschanel — a millionaire Hollywood star — urges poor Americans to avoid many common fruits and vegetables if they cannot afford to buy organic. Deschanel warns that these are fruits and vegetables that “you should strictly buy organic, due to the amount of pesticides on them.”

There are, of course, real reasons to be concerned about pesticide use, including the effect of chemicals on the environment and on the farmworkers who come into contact with high concentrations of toxic compounds.

But to date, there is little clear scientific support for the argument that organic produce is, by definition, healthier for consumers than conventional produce, or that conventional produce is actively dangerous because of pesticides"

https://undark.org/article/organic-food-science-zooey-deschanel/?utm_content=bufferd1554&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

FB: "Much more worrying than the prospect of pesticide residues, many experts say, is the prospect of driving consumers away from including fruits and vegetables in their diets altogether. “My work over the last 30 years has consistently suggested that the health risks are negligible for the consumption of conventional produce, and the biggest concern is making sure people eat fruits and vegetables,” said Carl Winter, a specialist in the Cooperative Extension at the University of California-Davis"

“The popularity of Microsoft Surface is the least realistic thing on television”

“I had adjusted my suspension-of-disbelief dial to accept literally everything about the Marvel universe, and was along for the ride until Wesley pulled out that Surface.

I’m a tech writer. My friends are all nerds. They have every device. Some of them even own Surfaces. But nobody just casually… pulls out a Surface. Unless they live in the alternate universe of Hollywood-produced TV and film, in which case, they do. Constantly...

In episode eight of season two, “Fork-Getta-Bout-It,” a forensic analyst uses his Surface at a crime scene to pull up information on a potential witness, and then later on the checkered tablecloth at a restaurant, editing a movie script using the stylus. The Surface gets about 30 seconds of screen time in each scene, which demonstrate the breadth of its capabilities. We see it propped up by its kickstand. We see fingers tap at its touch screen. We see the colorful notes that can be drawn atop a document. We see that its flat keyboard is detachable. Microsoft pulled off a similar streeetch on Black-ish, which continues the storyline in one episode with a 60-second spot that airs during the show’s commercial break. In the spot, the main character Dre and his co-workers, who work at an ad agency in the show, brainstorm ideas for a Microsoft Surface ad.”

Related: why everyone on tv has the same hair

FB: so real! “It’s not like these hamfisted placements are disrupting what would otherwise be poignant moments of drama. It just feels bad. First of all, it takes you out of the scene — notice the Surface once, and you’ll notice it each and every time. Second, it’s insulting. This guy is just casually using a Surface in bed? And it’s not just falling over? Do you think I’m an idiot?”

"Why Aesha Ash is Wandering Around Inner City Rochester in a Tutu"

"In 2011, she launched the Swan Dreams Project to inspire kids in the community she grew up in. The original idea was to post images of herself in a tutu all over Rochester. "I remember growing up and in the bodega you'd see images of girls in bikinis on motorbikes," says Ash. "I wanted to replace those with photos that show women of color in a different light."

She knew the power imagery can have: She still remembers what it felt like as a student at the School of American Ballet to see a photo of black ballet dancer Andrea Long. "That image was everything on days when I was feeling disenchanted. I'd see that picture of her, and know that the struggles I was going through, she went through them, too" 

http://www.dancemagazine.com/aesha-ash-wandering-around-inner-city-rochester-tutu-2307053851.html

"What happened to Chicago’s Japanese neighborhood?"

"The answer to Irene’s question is directly tied to a Chicago immigrant experience like no other. Japanese-Americans didn’t end up in Chicago of their own accord: The U.S. government forcibly resettled 20,000 of them to the city from World War II incarceration camps. And, as part of that effort, the government pressured them to shed their Japanese identities and assimilate into white society.

The result? Unlike cities on the West Coast, Chicago’s “Japantown” was not official and it was short-lived. The government’s efforts have had a lingering effect on Japanese-Americans, though.

As one Chicago Japanese-American tells it: “You had to basically be unseen.”...

In the 1960s, a Japanese-American community formed in Lake View, which was considered affordable at the time. The move might seem to defy the government’s warning not to congregate, but Doi says it was actually in line with the government’s vision for assimilation.

“The long game was about housing and employment,” Doi says. “Getting Japanese-Americans into more middle-class and whiter housing was the long-term solution to [what the WRA saw as] the ‘Japanese-American problem.’”...

Many eventually settled in the Chicago suburbs, but there was never an effort to recreate a neighborhood like the one in Lake View. However, in recent years, a new, distinct Japanese-American enclave has formed in Arlington Heights, consisting mainly of foreign-born Japanese who arrived to take jobs for tech companies between 1990 and 2000."

http://interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/chicago-japanese-neighborhood/

"Goodbye, Yosemite. Hello, What?"

"In 1851, California’s governor, Peter Burnett, said that he expected “a war of extermination” to continue “between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct,” and Senator John Weller later said that “the interest of the white man demands their extinction.” Toward that end, California spent the equivalent of $45 million in today’s money on two dozen state militia expeditions that murdered at least 1,340 California Indians, according to Benjamin Madley, a historian at U.C.L.A. and the author of “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873,” whose work I am heavily indebted to. The Army and its auxiliaries killed a minimum of 1,680 more, and vigilantes murdered at least 6,460. Congress reimbursed California for most of that money, retrospectively endorsing genocidal campaigns...

The best surviving account of the Mariposa Battalion comes from a member named Lafayette Bunnell. He describes tracking the Ahwahneechee into that deep glacier-cut valley midwinter and — alone in his group of uninterested killers — swooning over the booming waterfalls and soaring golden granite. Bunnell fascinates me because he was deeply responsive to the natural beauty of Yosemite, captivated by the opportunity to (re)name everything he saw and thoroughly afflicted with commonplace Victorian delusions about the supposed inferiority of nonwhites.

Bunnell finds well-tended homes and food stores and even smoldering hearth fires, but only one person, an elderly woman too frail to run and hide. Bunnell describes her as “a peculiar, living ethnological curiosity” and tells somebody to “bring something for it to eat.”...

Tenaya looked upset and confused and he replied, “It already has a name; we call it Py-we-ack.” Bunnell explained that he’d decided to rename it “because it was upon the shores of the lake that we had found his people, who would never return to it to live.”

In other words, Tenaya Lake — a place so important to me that I want my ashes scattered there — is named not in honor of Tenaya but in joyous celebration of the destruction of his people."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/opinion/sunday/goodbye-yosemite-hello-what.html

FB: This history of Yosemite "Bunnell learned dozens of Native Californian names for creeks, rivers, waterfalls and cliffs, judged them all irrelevant and replaced them with English names. It is also filled with Bunnell’s contempt for anybody who wished to romanticize Indian names “in their desire to cater to the taste of those credulous admirers of the Noble Red Man,” adding that “the reality” of Native Californians is “graded low down in the scale of humanity.”"

"I’m obsessed with this startup dog prison"

"The company’s marketing refers to their product as “on demand neighborhood dog houses.” Very cute! One thing, though, I thought to myself as I read that: dog houses don’t lock you inside via app once you enter them.

It felt, fundamentally, like Dog Parker solved a problem that didn’t exist. That’s not all that notable — highly ambitious tech people seem to do stuff like that all the time. But what made this iteration of the tech trope so special, to me, is that this was the only one that had produced a prison for dogs...

There was only one move I had left. One foolproof reporting tactic. It was time for me, personally, to enter the Dog Parker."

https://theoutline.com/post/2189/i-m-obsessed-with-this-startup-dog-prison?zd=1&zi=yra3r4dj

"First Evidence That Online Dating Is Changing the Nature of Society"

"One obvious type of network links each node with its nearest neighbors, in a pattern like a chess board or chicken wire. Another obvious kind of network links nodes at random. But real social networks are not like either of these. Instead, people are strongly connected to a relatively small group of neighbors and loosely connected to much more distant people.

These loose connections turn out to be extremely important. “Those weak ties serve as bridges between our group of close friends and other clustered groups, allowing us to connect to the global community,” say Josue Ortega at the University of Essex in the U.K. and Philipp Hergovich at the University of Vienna in Austria...

The researchers start by simulating what happens when extra links are introduced into a social network. Their network consists of men and women from different races who are randomly distributed. In this model, everyone wants to marry a person of the opposite sex but can only marry someone with whom a connection exists. This leads to a society with a relatively low level of interracial marriage.

But if the researchers add random links between people from different ethnic groups, the level of interracial marriage changes dramatically. “Our model predicts nearly complete racial integration upon the emergence of online dating, even if the number of partners that individuals meet from newly formed ties is small,” say Ortega and Hergovich."

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609091/first-evidence-that-online-dating-is-changing-the-nature-of-society/

The language here is weird, but the concepts are interesting. Of course, these same data have revealed a LOT about racism in dating too - 

related: several...