Epicene Cyborg

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May 21, 2018

Abandoning a generation in the land of the gun.

Study finds growing wealth gap between seniors and families with children.

“Another nail in the coffin for learning styles” – students did not benefit from studying according to their supposed learning style.

“The country’s 80 percent losers, and growing every day.”

Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why.

How Judea Pearl Became One of AI’s Sharpest Critics.

May 20, 2018

France to fine men up to €750 for wolf-whistling or making sexual comments to women.

The Atlantic trots out a familiar argument blaming the upper-middle class for income inequality. It’s wrong.

Texas school had a shooting plan, armed officers and practice. And still 10 people died.

Why Photography’s B&W vs Color Debate Is No Debate At All.

Facebook is tracking you on over 8.4 million websites.

A new analysis by The Washington Post found that more people have been killed at schools so far in 2018 than have been killed while serving in the U.S. military, based on data from Defense Department news releases.

Resentment of Crazy-Rich Americans Isn’t Just Envy. People are bothered by a sense that the system is rigged and unfair. People are rightly disturbed by the reality of the situation.

40 Cellphone-Tracking Devices Discovered Throughout Washington. Am sure every major city has dozens if not hundreds of these. They are cheap and effective, so of course they do.

Student debt crisis watch: pay $18,000 of your $24,000 loan, owe $24,000.

Is nature continuous or discrete? How the atomist error was born.

May 19, 2018

Immigration crackdown shifts to employers as audits surge.

APOD: 2018 May 18 – Attack of the Laser Guide Stars.

How NASA’s Mission to Pluto Was Nearly Lost.

Electronics for extreme environments.

May 18, 2018

Community Colleges and how easy it is to make fun of someone else. Community colleges provide a better actual education than the vast majority of four-year universities.

There’s no denying it — a student loan crisis is coming.

Almost half of US families can’t afford basics like rent and food. That’s ok, they can eat FREEDOM and live in LIBERTY.

Yes, Neoliberalism Is a Thing. Don’t Let Economists Tell You Otherwise. Economists like to use the colossally stupid Cosma Shalizi-like argument that if you can’t point to something labeled “neoliberalism” somewhere, that it doesn’t exist.

The U.S. birthrate hits another record low. Even women in their 30s are having fewer babies.

The Curse of an Open Floor Plan. A flowing, connected interior—once a fringe experiment of American architectural modernism—has become ubiquitous, and beloved. But it promises a liberation from housework that remains a fantasy.

May 17, 2018

More girls are attempting suicide. It’s not clear why.

FDA to start naming names of pharma companies blocking cheaper generics.

Completely Silent Computer.

Results indicate that corrective messages have a moderate influence on belief in misinformation (r = .35); however, it is more difficult to correct for misinformation in the context of politics (r = .15) and marketing (r = .18) than health (r = .27).

Inaccessible Accessibility.

Forget scanning license plates; cops will soon ID you via your roof rack. ELSAG LPR upgrade can ID “spare tire, bumper sticker, or a ride-sharing company decal.”

It’s always the meta-game that gets you.

May 16, 2018

Medical Mystery: Something Happened to U.S. Health Spending After 1980. Hmm, what else happened about that time? I guess we’ll never know!

The Political Impact of Immigration: Evidence from the United States.

While #MeToo has exposed the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in a handful of high-profile industries, its priorities have so far reflected broader social hierarchies, giving outsize attention to the experiences of a privileged minority.

Trade, Trust and Madeira.

Understanding why Americans save so little for retirement comes back, as so many things economic do, to stagnant wages.

Flehmen response.

May 15, 2018

Police Realizing That SESTA/FOSTA Made Their Jobs Harder; Sex Traffickers Realizing It’s Made Their Job Easier.

All major U.S. carriers give your real-time location info to third parties. This is the dystopia we were promised.

Schizophrenia is considered a disorder of the mind, influencing the way a person thinks, feels and behaves. But our latest research shows that organs, other than the brain, also change at the onset of the disease.

Huffington Post editor thinks journalism is only authentic when you don’t pay the writer.

Juno meets Cassini: A new merged global map of Jupiter.

Yes, Europa really is sending plumes of water into space.

China really is to blame for millions of lost U.S. manufacturing jobs, new study finds.

Mumbling Isn’t a Sign of Laziness—It’s a Clever Data-Compression Trick.

The Peter Principle and the Meaninglessness of Hierarchy.

May 14, 2018

We can’t forget about mass transit when we talk about the ‘future of transportation.’ It can’t just be flying cars and jetpacks.

White women ages 20-45, who are more than twice as likely to marry as Black women, live in metro areas with an average of 118 unmarried White men per 100 unmarried White women. Black women, on the other hand, face markets with only 78 single men per 100 single women.

We are getting less every day, and paying more for it, all the while the core openness that made the world wide web such a dynamic and interesting place is rapidly disappearing.

How Housing Markets Work — and Why They’re at a Breaking Point. Housing market in the US has been broken for decades.

Despite how we look to Brown v. Board as a critical moment in American history–which of course it is–it’s important to remember that for most American students, integrated schools never happened.

DNA is just another way we can’t opt out of data sharing.

May 13, 2018

China’s bullet train is a startling example of how far behind US infrastructure has become. Yep. I go to another country and it feels like I am in the future.

Botanical Latin.

Forest Biomes of North America.

Auto executives got more than they bargained for in lobbying Trump to ease fuel standard. Meeting with the president, the car companies suggest they’d rather not see an assault on California’s authority to set its own emissions rules.

And Now, For His Grand Finale, Paul Ryan Is Trying to Kick at Least a Million People Off of Food Stamps.

Why Winners Keep Winning.

The Road to Unfreedom.

May 12, 2018

US cities losing 36 million trees a year, researchers find.

Property markets reap profit from human necessity. We recognize that shelter is a human right. And yet, in our market societies, we accept that landlords have the right to get rich from this basic need.

America’s Greatest Horticulturist Left Behind a Plum Mystery.

This Asteroid Shouldn’t Be Where Astronomers Found It.

Preserving scholarly information: LOCKSS, CLOCKKS, and portico.

Tracing how horse domestication turned the Eurasian Steppe into a highway.

It is, even by post-colonial African standards, just a broken place.

Parallelepiped.

Who can afford to invest in a poor neighborhood? (Part 1).

May 11, 2018

love letters as writing samples, the candidate who spoke Pirate, and other tales of amazing resumes.

Although attacks like the one in Toronto that killed 10 people are rare, the hate being spread online is leading increasingly to threats and calls for violence. More often than not, the threats target women.

How one man’s death led to the extinction of a butterfly population.

Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too. A company catering to law enforcement and corrections officers has raised privacy concerns with a product that can locate almost anyone’s cellphone across the United States.

Voices on the left are rising in the US. Why aren’t they in mainstream media? Could impact profits, so will never get a voice.

Google is forcing websites to change to support HTTPS. Sounds innocuous until you realize how many millions of historic domains won’t make the switch. It’s as if a library decided to burn all books written before 2000, say.

May 10, 2018

The only things going up in price are the bare necessities.

At Yale, Starbucks and everywhere else, being black in America really is this hard.

Do protons decay?

May 9, 2018

Three wild speculations from amateur quantitative macrohistory.

May 8, 2018

A Letter to My Daughter About the Black Magic of Banking.

Whose Appalachia Is It, Anyway? Recent upheavals in the region reflect an electorate that is more eclectic than it is given credit for—and that is up for grabs.

Private space companies no longer have to follow the law.

May 7, 2018

America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People.

Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts.

Yes, It’s Bad. Robocalls, and Their Scams, Are Surging.

Arming Teachers Has Already Led to a Slew of Gun Accidents in Schools.

Google’s Software Is Malware.

Earth’s carbon dioxide levels reach highest point in 800,000 years.

Old people can’t open new tabs and it’s fueling our descent into hell. Not just old people; in my experience, about half of users have no idea how to work with tabs.

May 6, 2018

The unemployment rate is down. Here’s why that’s bad news.

If we’re serious about sexual fulfillment, we should worry more about economic inequality, not sex robots.

Ironically, Alanis Morissette never got enough credit. I always preferred Alanis’ work to Fiona Apple’s.

Progress in economics.

Governments Are Nothing Like Households.

The Big Lie ISPs Are Spreading in State Legislatures is That They Don’t Make Enough Money.

Don’t be shocked that Swedish meatballs are Turkish. All your food is from somewhere else.

Why Karl Marx is more relevant than ever.

Why humans need stories.

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