#Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work

[tonkicollective]

Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work

#Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work android

#Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work Pc

#Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work plus

#Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work windows

This changed to 2 billion monthly active users in May 2017.

#Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work android

On, Google announced that there were 1.4 billion Android users and 1 billion Google play users active during that month. iPads and Androids), and they individually had a slight increase in sales in 2015.

#Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work Pc

Gartner includes Macs (running macOS) in PC sales numbers (but not e.g. įor 2015 (and earlier), Gartner reports for "the year, worldwide PC shipments declined for the fourth consecutive year, which started in 2012 with the launch of tablets" with an 8% decline in PC sales for 2015 (not including cumulative decline in sales over the previous years). Not only do smartphones sell in higher numbers than traditional PCs – but also as a whole a lot more, by dollar value – with the gap only projected to widen, to well over double. Shipments (to stores) do not mean sales to consumers (not necessarily in the year of shipment), therefore suggesting the numbers indicate popularity and/or usage could be misleading. Worldwide device shipments by Operating System In 2020, Chromebook shipments increased over 80% to total nearly 30 million units, largely due to demand from the North American education market." Chromebooks sold more than Apple's Macs worldwide.Īccording to Gartner, the following is the worldwide device shipments (referring to wholesale) by operating system, which includes smartphones, tablets, laptops and PCs together. However, in the end according to Gartner, PC shipments grew "10.7% in Fourth Quarter of 2020 and reached 275 million units in 2020, a 4.8% increase from 2019 and the highest growth in ten years." Apple in 4th place for PCs had the largest growth in shipments for a company in Q4 of 31.3%, while "the fourth quarter of 2020 was another remarkable period of growth for Chromebooks, with shipments increasing around 200% year over year to reach 11.7 million units. In May 2020, Gartner predicted a decline in all market segments for 2020 (from already declining market in 2019) due to COVID-19, predicting a decline by 13.6% for all devices, while "Work from Home Trend Saved PC Market from Collapse", with them only predicting to decline by 10.5% for PCs. Hypothetically some operating systems used in embedded systems are more popular than the ones mentioned above. These use varied operating systems a high percentage are standalone or do not have a web browser, which makes their usage share difficult to measure. The most numerous type of device with an operating system are embedded systems. Linux is also most used for (web) servers, and then most often Ubuntu used, the most common Linux distribution. Linux has completely dominated the supercomputer field since 2017, with all of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world running a Linux distribution.Smartphones have the most use in virtually all countries, including in the US, at 51%, with PC operating systems (including Windows) down to 46%. įor the above devices, smartphones and other pocket-sized devices make up 58%, desktops and laptops 39%, and tablets 2.5%. With tablets, Apple's iPadOS has 54% and Android has 46% worldwide.

#Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work plus

" desktop Linux" at 2.48%, plus Google's ChromeOS at 2.38%, in the US up to 3.2%).

#Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work windows

For desktop and laptop computers, Windows is the most used at 75%, followed by Apple's macOS at 15%, and Linux-based operating systems, at 5% (i.e.For smartphones and other pocket-sized devices, Android leads with 72% market share, and Apple's iOS has 28%.These numbers do not include embedded devices or game consoles. It has 43% of the global market, followed by Windows with 30%, Apple iOS with 17%, macOS with 6%, then (desktop) Linux at 0.98% also using the Linux kernel. Most device types that people interact with access the web, so using web access statistics helps compare the usage share of operating systems across most device types, and also the usage share of operating systems used for the same types.Īs of April 2022, Android, an operating system using the Linux kernel, is the world's most-used operating system when judged by web use. Operating systems are used in numerous device types, from embedded devices without a screen through to supercomputers. There are few reliable primary sources and no agreed methodologies for its collection. All such figures are necessarily estimates because data about operating system share is difficult to obtain. The usage share of operating systems is the percentage of computing devices that run each operating system (OS) at any particular time. ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) ( May 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) There might be a discussion about this on the talk page. This article may be confusing or unclear to readers.

[anjust]

Percent of the u.s. population used computers at work

We wish to note particularly the remarkable diligence and devotion to our task of our Executive Director, David B. The contributions of individuals who served as our immediate staff are acknowledged in the Preface to the report. We wish to thank everyone at HEW who helped us. Our undertaking has required the cooperation of many agencies and organizations and the assistance of many individuals. We have greatly appreciated the opportunity to be of service to you and the Department, and, we hope, to all our fellow citizens. Both you and former Secretary Richardson deserve praise for responding to public concern about the issues posed by automation of personal-data record- keeping operations. We are grateful for the interest that you have expressed in our work. Our recommendations provide the framework for general solutions and also specify actions to be taken both within HEW and by the Federal government as a whole. The Committee believes that the report makes a significant contribution toward understanding many of the problems arising from the application of computer technology to record keeping about people. It is a privilege for me to submit this report to you on behalf of the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Automated Personal Data Systems. In addition, doctors can look up frequently and make eye contact to reestablish the relationship, Frankel said.Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare If possible, it can be arranged so both doctor and patient can see the screen, he said. They should introduce the patient to the computer and explain how and why they will be using it. “Technology in the exam room is neither good nor bad inherently,” but doctors can use specific techniques to help patients get comfortable with it, he said. “When people are paying attention to the same thing at the same time, you get the best transmission of information,” Frankel told Reuters Health by phone. Frankel of the Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, who wrote an editorial accompanying the story. “On the other hand, maybe patients sense that their clinicians aren’t listening as carefully to them,” she said.ĭoctors who spend most of the time looking at the computer may miss out on an emotional connection with the patient, said Richard M. Problems in care may lead to more computer use, which would explain the link between computer use and lower patient satisfaction, she said. “Electronic health records give important health information to clinicians, which may help safety net patients with communication barriers like limited health literacy and limited English proficiency.” “For example, a primary care provider says, ‘No, the cardiologist actually wants you to stop taking that medication,’” she said. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Ratanawongsa said. In the post-appointment interview the patients rated the quality of their care over the past six months.Ībout half of the 25 encounters with high computer use were rated as “excellent care” by the patients, compared to more than 80 percent of the 19 encounters with low computer use, as reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.ĭoctors who spent more time using the computer spent less time making eye contact with patients and tended to engage in more “negative rapport building,” correcting patients about their medical history or drugs they’ve taken based on information in the electronic record. The electronic health records could be used to review test results, track health care maintenance, prescribe medications and refer patients to specialists. Using the tapes, the researchers rated how much each physician used the computer during the appointment on a scale from one to 12. Researchers interviewed them by phone before their appointment, videotaped the appointment, and interviewed the patients again after their visit. The patients had type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis or congestive heart failure, and sometimes more than one of those chronic conditions. The researchers used data from encounters between 47 patients and 39 doctors at a public hospital between 20. “So it’s not surprising that we found differences in the way clinicians and patients talk to each other,” she said.īut doctors who used the computer more also spent more time correcting or disagreeing with patients, she told Reuters Health by email. Neda Ratanawongsa of the University of California, San Francisco, who co-authored the research letter. “Many clinicians worry that electronic health records keep them from connecting with their patients,” said Dr. (Reuters Health) - Doctors who entered data into computerized health records during patients’ appointments did less positive communicating, and patients rated their care excellent less often, in a recent study.

[moremedtech]

MIT researchers develop advanced machine learning models to detect pancreatic cancer

MIT researchers develop advanced machine learning models to detect pancreatic cancer. MIT CSAIL researchers develop advanced machine-learning models that outperform current methods in detecting pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Prismatic perspectives pancreatic cancer The path forward The first documented case of pancreatic cancer dates from the 18th century. Since then, researchers have embarked on a long and difficult journey to better understand this elusive and deadly disease. To date, early intervention is the most effective cancer treatment. Unfortunately, due to its location deep within the abdomen, the pancreas is particularly difficult to detect early on. Scientists from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), as well as Limor Appelbaum, a staff scientist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), wanted to better identify potential high-risk patients. They set out to create two machine-learning models for the early detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common type of cancer. To gain access to a large and diverse database, the team collaborated with a federated network company and used electronic health record data from multiple institutions across the United States. This vast data set contributed to the models' reliability and generalizability, making them applicable to a wide range of populations, geographical locations, and demographic groups. The two models—the “PRISM” neural network and the logistic regression model (a statistical technique for probability)—outperformed current methods. The team’s comparison showed that while standard screening criteria identify about 10 percent of PDAC cases using a five-times higher relative risk threshold, Prism can detect 35 percent of PDAC cases at this same threshold. Using AI to detect cancer risk is not a new phenomenon; algorithms analyze mammograms, CT scans for lung cancer, and assist in the analysis of Pap smear tests and HPV testing, to name a few applications. “The PRISM models stand out for their development and validation on an extensive database of over 5 million patients, surpassing the scale of most prior research in the field,” says Kai Jia, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), MIT CSAIL affiliate, and first author on an open-access paper in eBioMedicine outlining the new work. “The model uses routine clinical and lab data to make its predictions, and the diversity of the U.S. population is a significant advancement over other PDAC models, which are usually confined to specific geographic regions, like a few health-care centers in the U.S. Additionally, using a unique regularization technique in the training process enhanced the models' generalizability and interpretability.” “This report outlines a powerful approach to use big data and artificial intelligence algorithms to refine our approach to identifying risk profiles for cancer,” says David Avigan, a Harvard Medical School professor and the cancer center director and chief of hematology and hematologic malignancies at BIDMC, who was not involved in the study. “This approach may lead to novel strategies to identify patients with high risk for malignancy that may benefit from focused screening with the potential for early intervention.”

Prismatic perspectives pancreatic cancer

The journey toward the development of PRISM began over six years ago, fueled by firsthand experiences with the limitations of current diagnostic practices. “Approximately 80-85 percent of pancreatic cancer patients are diagnosed at advanced stages, where cure is no longer an option,” says senior author Appelbaum, who is also a Harvard Medical School instructor as well as radiation oncologist. “This clinical frustration sparked the idea to delve into the wealth of data available in electronic health records (EHRs).” The CSAIL group’s close collaboration with Appelbaum made it possible to understand the combined medical and machine learning aspects of the problem better, eventually leading to a much more accurate and transparent model. “The hypothesis was that these records contained hidden clues — subtle signs and symptoms that could act as early warning signals of pancreatic cancer,” she adds. “This guided our use of federated EHR networks in developing these models, for a scalable approach for deploying risk prediction tools in health care.” Both PrismNN and PrismLR models analyze EHR data, including patient demographics, diagnoses, medications, and lab results, to assess PDAC risk. PrismNN uses artificial neural networks to detect intricate patterns in data features like age, medical history, and lab results, yielding a risk score for PDAC likelihood. PrismLR uses logistic regression for a simpler analysis, generating a probability score of PDAC based on these features. Together, the models offer a thorough evaluation of different approaches in predicting PDAC risk from the same EHR data. One paramount point for gaining the trust of physicians, the team notes, is better understanding how the models work, known in the field as interpretability. The scientists pointed out that while logistic regression models are inherently easier to interpret, recent advancements have made deep neural networks somewhat more transparent. This helped the team to refine the thousands of potentially predictive features derived from EHR of a single patient to approximately 85 critical indicators. These indicators, which include patient age, diabetes diagnosis, and an increased frequency of visits to physicians, are automatically discovered by the model but match physicians' understanding of risk factors associated with pancreatic cancer.

The path forward

Despite the promise of the PRISM models, as with all research, some parts are still a work in progress. U.S. data alone are the current diet for the models, necessitating testing and adaptation for global use. The path forward, the team notes, includes expanding the model's applicability to international datasets and integrating additional biomarkers for more refined risk assessment. “A subsequent aim for us is to facilitate the models' implementation in routine health care settings. The vision is to have these models function seamlessly in the background of health care systems, automatically analyzing patient data and alerting physicians to high-risk cases without adding to their workload,” says Jia. “A machine-learning model integrated with the EHR system could empower physicians with early alerts for high-risk patients, potentially enabling interventions well before symptoms manifest. We are eager to deploy our techniques in the real world to help all individuals enjoy longer, healthier lives.” Jia wrote the paper alongside Applebaum and MIT EECS Professor and CSAIL Principal Investigator Martin Rinard, who are both senior authors of the paper. Researchers on the paper were supported during their time at MIT CSAIL, in part, by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Boeing, the National Science Foundation, and Aarno Labs. TriNetX provided resources for the project, and the Prevent Cancer Foundation also supported the team. Source: MIT Read the full article

[tastydregs]

Pentagon-Funded Study Uses AI to Detect 'Violations of Social Norms' in Text

New research funded by the Pentagon suggests that artificial intelligence can scan and analyze blocks of text to discern whether the humans who wrote it have done something wrong or not.

David Byrne on New Tech and AI | Gizmodo Interview

The paper, written by two researchers at Ben-Gurion University, leverages predictive models that can analyze messages for what they call “social norm violations.” To do this, researchers used GPT-3 (a programmable large language model created by OpenAI that can automate content creation and analysis), along with a method of data parsing known as zero-shot text classification, to identify broad categories of “norm violations” in text messages. The researchers break down the purpose of their project like this:

While social norms and their violations have been intensively studied in psychology and the social sciences the automatic identification of social norms and their violation is an open challenge that may be highly important for several projects...It is an open challenge because we first have to identify the features/signals/variables indicating that a social norm has been violated...For example, arriving at your office drunk and dirty is a violation of a social norm among the majority of working people. However, “teaching” the machine/computer that such behavior is a norm violation is far from trivial.

Of course, the difficulty with this premise is that norms are different depending on who you are and where you’re from. Researchers claim, however, that while various cultures’ values and customs may differ, human responses to breaking with them may be fairly consistent. The report notes:

While social norms may be culturally specific and cover numerous informal “rules”, how people respond to norm violation through evolutionary-grounded social emotions may be much more general and provide us with cues for the automatic identification of norm violation...the results [of the project] support the important role of social emotions in signaling norm violation and point to their future analysis and use in understanding and detecting norm violation.

Researchers ultimately concluded that “a constructive strategy for identifying the violation of social norms is to focus on a limited set of social emotions signaling the violation,” namely guilt and shame. In other words, the scientists wanted to use AI to understand when a mobile user might be feeling bad about something they’ve done. To do this, they generated their own “synthetic data” via GPT-3, then leveraged zero-shot text classification to train predictive models that could “automatically identify social emotions” in that data. The hope, they say, is that this model of analysis can be pivoted to automatically scan SMS histories for signs of misbehavior.

Somewhat unsettlingly, this research was funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Created in 1958, DARPA has been at the forefront of U.S. military research and development for the better part of a century, frequently helping to create some of the most important technological innovations of our time (see: drones, vaccines, and the internet, among many others). The agency funds a broad diversity of research areas, always in the hopes of finding the next big thing for the American war machine.

Ben-Gurion researchers say their project was supported by DARPA’s computational cultural understanding program—an initiative with the vague mandate of developing “cross-cultural language understanding technologies to improve a DoD operator’s situational awareness and interactional effectiveness.” I’m not 100 percent sure what that’s supposed to mean, though it sounds (basically) like the Pentagon wants to create software that can analyze foreign populations for them so that, when the U.S. inevitably goes to war with said populations, we’ll understand how they’re feeling about it. That said, why DARPA would specifically want to study the topic of “social norm violation” is a bit unclear, so Gizmodo reached out to the agency for additional context and will update this story if it responds.

In essence, the research seems to be yet another form of sentiment analysis—an already fairly well-traversed area of the surveillance industrial complex. It’s also yet another sign that AI will inexorably be used to broaden the U.S. defense community’s powers, with decidedly alarming results.

[finneysmediastudies]

The Digital Revolution, It's like Deja Vu All Over Again

Communication in a Post-COVID Age

When we think of the Digital Revolution, as a concept, we generally think of the latter part of the 20th century when digital solutions began to replace many of the previous mechanical and analogue contraptions of our daily lives and society. Others may think of the proliferation of the personal home computer, or of the advent the internet as a household mainstay.

I'd like to propose that we've experienced a brand new Digital Revolution. With the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent global lockdowns, many people's relationship with the internet and communication changed. As reported here by the Pew Research Center, a vast majority of the adults they surveyed in 2021 (90%) said that the internet has been essential to them since the outbreak began. This change has taken place across multiple fronts.

According to research reported on at University of Connecticut, 89% of users reported an increase in their use of social media since the start of the pandemic. This trend can certainly be seen in the US (and global) user data given by TikTok in 2020. The social media app had just under 92 million monthly active users in June of 2020, up over 200% from its under 40 million users from October of 2019, and over 800% since January of 2018, four months after the app's international launch.

For many others, the beginning of the pandemic was the first time they worked remotely from home, especially with any regularity. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that remote work "accounted for about 50 percent of paid work hours between April and December 2020, compared with 5 percent before the pandemic." It has also been a time of change for schooling, most especially in the K-12 setting. Data from the Pew shows that 93% of parents had children receive some form of online learning.

People have also begun connecting personally digitally more as well. Also from the Pew, many adults felt that group messaging and video calls (44% and 30%, respectively) helped them "a lot" to stay connected with family and friends. Data gathered by Juniper Research shown here finds that there was a 50% growth in video call use from 2019 to 2020.

Some may say that the Digital Revolution has come and gone, but I say nay. While its form may be evolved, the Digital Revolution is still alive and well. Almost all Americans have greatly increased and changed their reliance on and relationships to the internet and communication, across all fronts. Like the first time, we are also seeing different problems pop up.

One major issue that has come sharply into focus affects the elderly population the most: a lack of tech literacy. The Pew found that 54% of 65-74-year-olds and 68% of 75+ respondents reported having "lower tech readiness." These individuals are among those hit the hardest by a harsh transition to digital communication, and were the most likely group to experience difficulties attempting to schedule a vaccine appointment online.

Another problem has been in access to appropriate technology and internet access. This is especially clear in the Pew findings on lower income K-12 students. 46% of lower income families reported at least one of the following issues: "having to do schoolwork on a cellphone, being unable to complete schoolwork because of lack of computer access at home, or having to use public Wi-Fi to finish schoolwork because there was no reliable connection at home."

These situations call to attention something that is somewhat underdiscussed and under considered by many: while the internet age has been a major boon and allowed for greater global connectedness than ever, it also carries the baggage of our societies as a whole. While many think of the internet as a great equalizer, it often disadvantages already marginalized individuals, an issue which we must be cognizant of and ready to work together to break down.

[robertreich]

Monopoly Mayhem: Corporations Win, Workers Lose

Why do big corporations continue to win while workers get shafted? It all comes down to power: who has it, and who doesn’t.     Big corporations have become so dominant that workers and consumers have fewer options and have to accept the wages and prices these giant corporations offer. This has become even worse now that thousands of small businesses have had to close as a result of the pandemic, while mammoth corporations are being bailed out.   At the same time, worker bargaining power has declined as fewer workers are unionized and technologies have made outsourcing easy, allowing corporations to get the labor they need for cheap.     These two changes in bargaining power didn’t happen by accident. As corporations have gained power, they’ve been able to gut anti-monopoly laws, allowing them to grow even more dominant. At the same time, fewer workers have joined unions because corporations have undermined the nation’s labor laws, and many state legislatures -- under intense corporate lobbying -- have enacted laws making it harder to form unions. Because of these deliberate power shifts, even before the pandemic, a steadily larger portion of corporate revenues have been siphoned off to profits, and a shrinking portion allocated to wages. Once the economy tanked, the stock market retained much of its value while millions of workers lost jobs and the unemployment rate soared to Great Depression-era levels. To understand the current concentration of corporate power we need to go back in time. 

In the late nineteenth century, corporate power was a central concern. “Robber barons,” like John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, amassed unprecedented wealth for themselves by crushing labor unions, driving competitors out of business, and making their employees work long hours in dangerous conditions for low wages. 

As wealth accumulated at the top, so too did power: Politicians of the era put corporate interests ahead of workers, even sending state militias to violently suppress striking workers. By 1890, public anger at the unchecked greed of the robber barons culminated in the creation of America’s first anti-monopoly law, the Sherman Antitrust Act. 

In the following years, antitrust enforcement waxed or waned depending on the administration in office; but after 1980, it virtually disappeared. The new view was that large corporations produced economies of scale, which were good for consumers, and anything that was good for consumers was good for America. Power, the argument went, was no longer at issue. America’s emerging corporate oligarchy used this faulty academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust. As the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement in the 1980s, American industry grew more and more concentrated. The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks. It okayed airline mergers, bringing the total number of American carriers down from twelve in 1980 to just four today. Three giant cable companies came to dominate broadband. A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry. Today, just five giant corporations preside over key, high-tech platforms, together comprising more than a quarter of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Facebook and Google are the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything. The monopolies of yesteryear are back with a vengeance. Thanks to the abandonment of antitrust, we’re now living in a new Gilded Age, as consolidation has inflated corporate profits, suppressed worker pay, supercharged economic inequality, and stifled innovation. Meanwhile, big investors have made bundles of money off the growing concentration of American industry. Warren Buffett, one of America’s wealthiest men, has been considered the conscience of American capitalism because he wants the rich to pay higher taxes. But Buffett has made his fortune by investing in monopolies that keep out competitors. -- The sky-high profits at Wall Street banks have come from their being too big to fail and their political power to keep regulators at bay. -- The high profits the four remaining airlines enjoyed before the pandemic came from inflated prices, overcrowded planes, overbooked flights, and weak unions. -- High profits of Big Tech have come from wanton invasions of personal privacy, the weaponizing of false information, and disproportionate power that prevents innovative startups from entering the market. If Buffett really wanted to be the conscience of American capitalism, he’d be a crusader for breaking up large concentrations of economic power and creating incentives for startups to enter the marketplace and increase competition. This mega-concentration of American industry has also made the entire economy more fragile -- and susceptible to deep downturns. Even before the coronavirus, it was harder for newer firms to gain footholds. The rate at which new businesses formed had already been halved from the pace in 1980. And the coronavirus has exacerbated this trend even more, bringing new business formations to a standstill with no rescue plan in sight. And it’s brought workers to their knees. There’s no way an economy can fully recover unless working people have enough money in their pockets to spend. Consumer spending is two-thirds of this economy. Perhaps the worst consequence of monopolization is that as wealth accumulates at the top, so too does political power. These massive corporations provide significant campaign contributions; they have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers and directly employ many voters. So items they want included in legislation are inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped. 

They get tax cuts, tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, and regulatory exemptions. When the government is handing out money to stimulate the economy, these giant corporations are first in line. When they’ve gone so deep into debt to buy back their shares of stock that they might not be able to repay their creditors, what happens? They get bailed out. It’s the same old story. The financial returns on their political investments are sky-high. Take Amazon – the richest corporation in America. It paid nothing in federal taxes in 2018. Meanwhile, it held a national auction to extort billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies from cities eager to house its second headquarters. It also forced Seattle, its home headquarters, to back away from a tax on big corporations, like Amazon, to pay for homeless shelters for a growing population that can’t afford the city’s sky-high rents, caused in part by Amazon!

And throughout this pandemic, Amazon has raked in record profits thanks to its monopoly of online marketplaces, even as it refuses to provide its essential workers with robust paid sick leave and has fired multiple workers for speaking out against the company's safety issues. While corporations are monopolizing, power has shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers. 

In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.2 percent of them are. Since the 1980s, corporations have fought to bust unions and keep workers’ wages low. They’ve campaigned against union votes, warning workers that unions will make them less “competitive” and threaten their jobs. They fired workers who try to organize, a move that’s illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but happens all the time because the penalty for doing so is minor compared to the profits that come from discouraging unionization. 

Corporations have replaced striking workers with non-union workers. Under shareholder capitalism, striking workers often lose their jobs forever. You can guess the kind of chilling effect that has on workers’ incentives to take a stand against poor conditions. As a result of this power shift, workers have less choice of whom to work for. This also keeps their wages low. Corporations have imposed non-compete, anti-poaching, and mandatory arbitration agreements, further narrowing workers’ alternatives. 

Corporations have used their increased power to move jobs overseas if workers don’t agree to pay cuts. In 1988, General Electric threatened to close a factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana that made electrical motors and to relocate it abroad unless workers agreed to a 12 percent pay cut. The Fort Wayne workers eventually agreed to the cut. One of the factory’s union leaders remarked, “It used to be that companies had an allegiance to the worker and the country. Today, companies have an allegiance to the corporate shareholder. Period.” Meanwhile, as unions have shrunk, so too has their political power. In 2009, even with a Democratic president and Democrats in control of Congress, unions could not muster enough votes to enact a simple reform that would have made it easier for workplaces to unionize. All the while, corporations have been getting states to enact so-called “right-to-work” laws barring unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. Since worker representation costs money, these laws effectively gut the unions by not requiring workers to pay dues. In 2018, the Supreme Court, in an opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees, extended “right-to-work” to public employees. This great shift in bargaining power from workers to corporate shareholders has created an increasingly angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. Trump took full advantage. All of this has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since World War II. 

That’s true even during a severe downturn. For the last decade, most profits have been going into stock buybacks and higher executive pay rather than new investment. The declining share of total U.S. income going to the bottom 90 percent over the last four decades correlates directly with the decline in unionization. Most of the increasing value of the stock market has come directly out of the pockets of American workers. Shareholders have gained because workers stopped sharing the gains. So, what can be done to restore bargaining power to workers and narrow the widening gap between corporate profits and wages? For one, make stock buybacks illegal, as they were before the SEC legalized them under Ronald Reagan. This would prevent corporate juggernauts from siphoning profits into buybacks, and instead direct profits towards economic investment. Another solution: Enact a national ban on “right-to-work” laws, thereby restoring power to unions and the workers they represent. Require greater worker representation on corporate boards, as Germany has done through its “employee co-determination” system. Break up monopolies. Break up any bank that’s “too big to fail”, and expand the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to find monopolies and review and halt anti-competitive mergers. Designate large technology platforms as “utilities” whose prices are regulated in the public interest and require that services like Amazon Marketplace and Google Search be spun off from their respective companies. Above all, antitrust laws must stop mergers that harm workers, stifle competition, or result in unfair pricing. This is all about power. The good news is that rebalancing the power of workers and corporations can create an economy and a democracy that works for all, not just a privileged few.

[bexterbex]

A Soul to Mend His Own | Ch. 14

Warning, if it hasn’t been obvious in the movies there is Nazi symbolism within the First Order. I will expand on this much more throughout the story. If this is something that bothers you, please just exit the story. The author does not condone any Nazi ideals, this is just for fictional uses only.

A Kylo Ren x Modern! Reader in a soulmate au with some canon divergence. —————————————SLOWBURN————————————–

He is already the Supreme leader, searching the universe to find you, his Empress. Your name on his wrist has been the only constant in his life, while you have doubts about his existence and his acceptance of you. He isn’t in the database and why did the name Kylo Ren cover Ben Solo?

Masterlist

Just a reiteration, none of the government officials are based off a specific real person. They are all old privileged men. I do not want to date this fic in that way. I am trying to base their political standings off of the majority of their country's beliefs. They are not progressive, but they are harshly conservative.

Also, I may be later in posting the next few days or may not be able to post, my Tumblr @bexterbex will have a post on whether or not I can post that day. My sister is getting ready to have baby #3 and I am with her assisting with her other 2 and cleaning house. Sorry for any future inconvenience.

Chapter 14: Dirty Politics

Entering the war room once again, everyone shifted uncomfortably as you two entered. Kylo’s demeanor shifted into one of strength and power, with underlying tones of anger. You took your seats once more ready to begin. Kylo now held your hand above the table as a silent way to dare anyone in the room to disrespect you. 

“Shall we begin,” asked Hux. 

Kylo nodded in response.

“The Finalizer will arrive late tonight, early tomorrow morning to help with the demands of registration and the health regime. Currently, we need to help evaluate an addition to the education system to increase overall hygiene here on the surface,” said Hux.

With this Prime Minister of Australia scoffed, “our people are not unclean, I think the First Order is overstepping its bounds with telling people how to clean themselves.”

“Currently over 700 million people are living in extreme poverty. 8.9 percent of your population are defecating in non-hygienic places, unvaccinated children are on the rise in your first world countries, are just but a few issues the Earth has with health,” said a male first order officer. “Does this not concern you that almost one-seventh of the world's population is without almost any health care? That disease may spread overnight?” 

“Sub Saharan Africa and the poor areas of Asia are not my concern,” said the Australian Prime Minister.

“Were you not asked to help represent all of the governments of your world,” asked General Hux, daring the prime minister to defy him. 

“Yes, the prime minister did agree to that,” said the Chancellor of Germany. 

“The U.S. government’s own Center for Disease Control reported that 35 percent of women and 69 percent of men do not wash their hands after using the restroom. A basic hygiene principle that is shared across the galaxy. Obviously, Earth does need education on hygiene as it would help stop any of these outbreaks that you have been known to have,” said another female officer.

The Prime Minister of Russia scoffed, “we are not unclean.”

“I don’t believe they were suggesting you were unclean, but that the majority of Earth was unclean,” you replied.

“There is also the discussion of reproductive health, all First Order planets have adequate birth control and access to feminine hygiene products. Which we can see from the data, your planet seems to be lacking in all these areas and will need to be justified,” said the female officer.

“Birth control and feminine hygiene product? Now this is ridiculous,” said the U.S. President. “There will be no need for the First Order being involved in that. Besides periods are not an important medical issue.”

This made you a bit angry, but fortunately enough for the President, it was General Hux who spoke first, “The First Order merely wants those who would like these products to be able to receive them.”  

“Yes, and I suppose you want our women to become common First Order whores with this access to birth control,” asked the almost now enraged Russian Prime Minister. Staring directly at you.

This conversation made your blood boil. He was now insinuating exactly what he was thinking earlier about you. Kylo’s grip on your hand tightened. You could hear him snort through the vocoder, “Certainly your wife will be of no use to us, but a healthy self-controlled population is necessary. After all, I believe it is also common here on Earth that you are born from women, and I believe you have not advanced enough for the use of clones.”

With this statement, the Russian Prime Minister stood up enraged. “What you do with your ha-“ he wasn’t able to complete his sentence before he was grabbing at an invisible hand around his neck, choking the air out of him. All eyes on him. 

General Hux next to you turned to Kylo pleaded, “Supreme Leader, I might suggest that you release him. It would not look good to the Russian people if you killed their prime minister and they are not a country we can afford not to be cooperative.”

You turned to Kylo, desperate to find his eyes through his mask as he turns to you. “Release him.” In an instant, the prime minister dropped to the floor gasping for air. The U.S. President and Australian Prime Minister helping him back into his seat. All of the government officials in the room looked terrified.

You had no idea what just happened. You didn’t really know how Kylo did what he did, but that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that he did it in the first place. Before you could speak, Kylo addressed the room. 

“You and your people will follow the will of the First Order, my will as Supreme Leader. I will leave health decisions to a committee that I have designated. They will bring forward their proposals and I will either approve or disapprove them from there. This discussion and meeting are over. See to it during tomorrow's meetings that you all control yourselves or there will be consequences for your people,” and with that, he stood and he leads you to stand as well. He guided you out the door without another word. You did not stop at the red sitting room again, instead, he lead you out of the White House and into his command shuttle. 

You sat down and before you could even start to buckle yourself he was doing it for you. You could feel the silent pent up anger radiating off of him. He barked a harsh order to the pilot to take you back to the Steadfast. 

The ride up was in total silence, but he took you hand in his once more. Once you docked, he was quick to unbuckle you both. Quickly guiding you both through the hangar and the halls, not stopping for the official salute. You quickly found him leading you not to his chambers but to the room that he had shown you. The door quickly opened and you two rushed in. Before the door could completely shut, his helmet was off and tossed to the side making a loud thud against the durasteel. 

Kylo’s back was against the star side windows—sitting. His face in one hand and the other holding itself out to you. His breathing was labored again, you feared what was behind his eyes. 

You took his hand and he pulled you down into him. His face buried in your neck, his arms wrapped tightly around you—he was holding back a sob. Your hand found its way into his hair as the other to his lower back. You began to rub circles trying to calm him.

“Kylo,” you said softly.

He was looking at you now, “I am a monster, don’t you see? You shouldn’t stay with me, or you will get hurt too.”

“What was it that you said before? The Force brought me to you, why would I leave if it chose me for you?” This time you tucked yourself into his chest, refusing to move. 

After a few minutes, his breathing calmed and he wound a gloved hand in your hair, holding you to him. “I’m sorry.”

You tilted you head up to meet his eyes. “Whoever hurt you before doesn’t matter. I am here let me help you. Whether it’s to keep your temper in check, helping with work, or anything else that is why I am here.” You place a hand over his heart and one of his joins yours. 

“I had to protect you. I have to protect you, do you understand? Without you, I will self destruct. Taking everyone with me,” said Kylo while placing a hand under your chin. His thumb ghosting over your cheek.

“I know, but thoughts can’t harm me, only actions can. Defend me against actions. I like that you are trying to be a knight in shining armor but I am also a big girl who can handle herself. Especially against gross old men. When their thoughts turn into actions, then you can swoop in and save me.” You tucked yourself back into his chest, you both just sat there while time seemed to stop. 

“I need you by my side helping me with Earth. The politicians are stubborn and archaic. It's a large planet with a big population. The biggest the First Order has conquered yet, but your people are unhealthy and uneducated,” said Kylo finally. 

“Why don’t we go and try to figure out some of this together. I know you said you were going to appoint a committee, why don’t we try to do that now. Get it out of the way, and relieve some stress,” you suggested. 

Kylo simply nodded. You stood up, and so did he. He pulled you back to his chest once more and buried his face in your hair. You stood like that for several moments before he separated from you. He retrieved his helmet and once again you were off into the winding halls of the Steadfast. 

You reach a room you have never been to, once inside it was a large empty conference room. Kylo walked over to one of the computer panels on the wall and started typing in commands. 

“We will wait for the generals and officers to come back, in the meantime you and I will eat lunch.”

A droid appeared with plates of food and you and Kylo ate lunch in the conference room. One finished the droid took everything back. 

A junior officer entered the room and informed you that the generals and officers would be here shortly as their shuttle had just arrived. Moments later they filed through the door, quickly taking seats and seemingly ready for a bomb to go off. 

“We are going to discuss the health regime committee first and then I believe we should discuss other areas of education. The earth is a mess with citizen on citizen violence that will be stopped,” said Kylo.

“Well, the hygiene committee will be something easy to tackle. Mostly it should be filled with First Order medical staff, someone from the CDC and the WHO. Unlike the politicians I believe that average citizens and the Earth’s medical professionals will agree with a better health campaign,” you said.

“When the Finalizer docks tonight I can ask their chief medical officer to put together a group of nurses and doctors from both ships to start the committee,” said General Hux.

“Inform them that a visual campaign will help, videos and posters. Literally everywhere. Children will be the easiest to influence, adults will be harder,” you said. 

The officers were noting your comments. “This CDC and WHO are reputable,” asked General Pryde. 

“Yes, unfortunately, most of the time people only listen to them when there is an Ecoli outbreak in lettuce and not when it comes to washing hands and receiving vaccines. But I digress at the ignorance that is my own people,” you replied.

“So they will understand the need that we have for making this planet healthy? That the citizens must be healthy,” asked another officer.

“Yes, as far as I am aware, doctors on my planet take oaths to health and the safety of patients and potential patients. They also will believe in the science behind it, when given facts and studies. I have yet to meet a doctor that doesn’t want their patients to bathe regularly, to receive vaccinations, to have regular checkups. That is something doctors want,” you said. 

“General Hux will inform the chief medical officer of the Finalizer of what is to happen. Tomorrow the committee will be formed before 10:00 hours and will by the end of the day have a start to a more solid campaign,” said Kylo.

He then turned to you and asked, “Will you help with the health committee?”

“Yes,” you respond.

“Supreme Leader, we must also be aware that there must be an education started once all registration is completed. As of now we have currently completed the registration of 27% of the population has been registered to date and 98% of the registered have started their education process,” said general Hux.

“Yes, behavioral education along with the standard education must be important. We should hold off for two or three days to see where the health education committee is, that can always be put as a main focus to then share a behavioral one,” said Kylo.

The mention of behavioral training piqued your interest. What need was there for behavior training? And what would it involve? Public health was something you were comfortable sharing but if Kylo could read minds what would happen in this behavioral training. You silently hoped you would be able to shape or sway this. If you learned anything from movies, an overpowered government did not allow freedom, and freedom of thought was the most important thing you could think of. 

“But I would like General Pryde to investigate what already might be available for behavioral training education at the main library in the U.S.-“ Kylo turned to you to help answer.

“The Library of Congress,” you supplied. 

“Yes, the Library of Congress. There should be something there worth our time.” With that Kylo dismissed the officers before you were left alone General Hux approached you. 

“Here is your dog tags my lady. They will grant you access all over any First Order ship and if you happen to be separated from the Supreme Leader it will grant him the ability to find you,” and with that he handed you a set of angular looking dog tags that had a visible tracker chip and circuitry on the back. He soon left. You were now alone again with Kylo.

[newstfionline]

Sunday, May 16, 2021

IRS to the rescue? Tax audits eyed for infrastructure cash (AP) Republicans say they won’t raise taxes on corporations. Democrats say they won’t raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year. So who is going to pay for the big public works boost that lawmakers and President Joe Biden say is necessary for the country? Enter the IRS. Biden is proposing that Congress build up the depleted and often-maligned agency, saying that a more aggressive collection of unpaid taxes could help cover the cost of his multitrillion-dollar plan to boost infrastructure, families and education. More resources to boost audits of businesses, estates and the wealthy would raise $700 billion over 10 years, the White House estimates. It’s just the latest idea emerging in the bipartisan talks over an infrastructure bill, which saw Biden huddle at the White House this week with congressional leaders and a group of Republican senators. The GOP senators, touting a $568 billion infrastructure plan of their own, said they were “encouraged” by the discussion with Biden, but all sides acknowledged that how to pay for the public works plan remains a difficult problem.

DarkSide, Blamed for Gas Pipeline Attack, Says It Is Shutting Down (NYT) The criminal hacking group DarkSide, which the F.B.I. has blamed for carrying out a ransomware attack that crippled fuel delivery across the Southeastern United States this week, has announced that it is shutting down because of unspecified “pressure” from the United States. In a statement written in Russian and provided to The New York Times on Friday by the cybersecurity firm Intel 471, DarkSide said it had lost access to the public-facing portion of its online system, including its blog and payment server, as well as funds that it said had been withdrawn to an unknown account. It said the group’s main web page and other public-facing resources would go offline within 48 hours. “Due to the pressure from the U.S., the affiliate program is closed,” the statement said, referring to intermediary hackers, the so-called affiliates, it works with to break into corporate computer systems. “Stay safe and good luck.” What that pressure may have been is unclear, but on Thursday, President Biden said the United States would not rule out a retaliatory strike against DarkSide that would “disrupt their ability to operate.” Cybersecurity analysts cautioned that the DarkSide statement could be a ruse, allowing its members to regroup and deflect the negative attention caused by the attack.

Spanish politics (Times of London) Isabel Diaz Ayuso, 42, head of the Madrid Assembly, is Spain’s rising conservative star; Pedro Sánchez, 49, is the prime minister. She inflicted a humiliating defeat on his Socialist government when she doubled her Popular Party’s number of seats in snap regional elections last week, in large part due to her keeping open the Spanish capital during the pandemic. Their defeat has rocked Spain’s political landscape. Ayuso walloped the Socialist party, shaking Sánchez’s standing, while totally wiping out the centre-right Citizens party and hobbling the advance of the far-right Vox party. Dismissed by her opponents as a Trumpista populist and lightweight novice, Ayuso is now tipped as a future national leader and her brand of liberal conservatism is being held up as a model for winning future general elections. While the left licks its wounds and looks for scapegoats for its loss, in the streets of Madrid people stop her to hail her as a heroine. “You are a fighter. You have courage,” a woman interjected to say to her during her interview with The Times. “Thank you for defending us.” Ayuso believes Sánchez’s days are numbered. “The election has generated enormous hope in Madrid and across Spain for those who are looking for an alternative type of politics,” she said.

Masks off, Poles cheer reopening of bars and restaurants (AP) Poles pulled off their masks, hugged their friends and made toasts to their regained freedom as restaurants, bars and pubs reopened for the first time in seven months and the government dropped a requirement for people to cover their faces outdoors. The reopening, for now limited now to the outdoor consumption of food and drinks, officially took place on Saturday. Yet many could not wait for midnight to strike and were out on the streets of Warsaw and other cities hours earlier on Friday evening to celebrate, gathering outside popular watering holes. Some brought their own beer to hold them over until the they could buy drinks at midnight—though some bars were also seen serving up beers and cocktails early. “Now they are opening and I feel so awesome. You know, you feel like your freedom is back,” said Gabriel Nikilovski, a 38-year-old from Sweden who was having beer at an outdoor table at the Pavilions, a popular courtyard filled with pubs in central Warsaw. “It’s like you’ve been in prison, but you’ve been in prison at home.”

Spy Agencies Seek New Afghan Allies as U.S. Withdraws (NYT) Western spy agencies are evaluating and courting regional leaders outside the Afghan government who might be able to provide intelligence about terrorist threats long after U.S. forces withdraw, according to current and former American, European and Afghan officials. The effort represents a turning point in the war. In place of one of the largest multinational military training missions ever is now a hunt for informants and intelligence assets. Despite the diplomats who say the Afghan government and its security forces will be able to stand on their own, the move signals that Western intelligence agencies are preparing for the possible—or even likely—collapse of the central government and an inevitable return to civil war. Courting proxies in Afghanistan calls back to the 1980s and ‘90s, when the country was controlled by the Soviets and then devolved into a factional conflict between regional leaders. The West frequently depended on opposing warlords for intelligence—and at times supported them financially through relationships at odds with the Afghan population. Such policies often left the United States, in particular, beholden to power brokers who brazenly committed human rights abuses.

India’s coronavirus crisis spreads to its villages, where health care is hard to find (Washington Post) BANAIL, India—The illness traveled silently through the narrow lanes of this prosperous village in Uttar Pradesh, infecting both young and old. People complained of fevers, cough and breathlessness. Then they began to die. Vipin Kumar, a farmer in his 40s, was one of them. More than 20 people with coronavirus symptoms have died in the village over the past two weeks, according to locals, a significant increase over the three or four deaths per month the village saw before the pandemic. Most of them, like Kumar, were never tested. “Not a day goes by when there are no deaths,” said Hariom Raghav, a farmer and businessman who had just returned from a cremation. “If things continue like this, the village will empty out soon.” The story of Banail has been playing out in villages across India as the virus continues its deadly surge: Rural areas, where over 65 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people live, had been spared in the first wave of the pandemic but are now facing devastating numbers of infections. Three quarters of all districts in India are reporting a positivity rate of more than 10 percent, a health official said Tuesday, an indication of how widely the virus had spread.

China lands on Mars in major advance for its space ambitions (AP) China landed a spacecraft on Mars for the first time on Saturday, a technically challenging feat more difficult than a moon landing, in the latest step forward for its ambitious goals in space. Plans call for a rover to stay in the lander for a few days of diagnostic tests before rolling down a ramp to explore an area of Mars known as Utopia Planitia. It will join an American rover that arrived at the red planet in February. China’s first Mars landing follows its launch last month of the main section of what will be a permanent space station and a mission that brought back rocks from the moon late last year.

Back-to-back tornadoes kill 12 in China; over 300 injured (AP) Back-to-back tornadoes killed 12 people in central and eastern China and left more than 300 others injured, authorities said Saturday. Eight people died in the inland city of Wuhan on Friday night and four others in the town of Shengze, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) east in Jiangsu province, local governments said. Tornados are rare in China. In July 2019, a tornado killed six people in the northeastern Liaoning province, and another tornado the following month killed eight on the southern resort island of Hainan.

As protesters flee Hong Kong, Taiwan quietly extends a helping hand (Washington Post) Bobbing off the coast in a Zodiac speedboat scrubbed of identifying features, Kenny and four others waited nervously for the last leg of their desperate, 350-mile journey. The five had been arrested months earlier on the front lines of demonstrations in Hong Kong. They had escaped across the South China Sea, steering toward Taiwan with just some snacks, identification and a satellite phone. Now came the final hurdle: convincing the approaching Taiwanese Coast Guard—and the government—not to turn them back. Taiwanese authorities brought the five ashore, housed them in a government complex and provided clothing, cigarettes, television, table tennis games—even English teachers. Eventually, the Taiwanese, who treated the presence of the five as a state secret, helped arrange flights to the United States, their new home. The experience of the five shows the lengths to which self-ruled Taiwan has gone to protect and help fleeing Hong Kong protesters. As Beijing tightens the noose around Hong Kong’s democracy movement, Taiwan has emerged as a key destination for those escaping the dragnet—just as Hong Kong offered sanctuary for dissidents from mainland China in the 20th century. “Hong Kong was once a safe harbor, but now, Hong Kongers need a safe harbor,” said Samuel Chu, a second-generation activist whose father helped students flee China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Israel strike in Gaza destroys building with AP, other media (AP) An Israeli airstrike destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed offices of The Associated Press and other media outlets on Saturday, the latest step by the military to silence reporting from the territory amid its battle with the militant group Hamas. The strike came nearly an hour after the military ordered people to evacuate the building, which also housed Al-Jazeera, other offices and residential apartments. The strike followed another Israeli air raid on a densely populated refugee camp in Gaza City killed at least 10 Palestinians from an extended family, mostly children.

Medics: Israeli airstrikes kill 26 in downtown Gaza City (AP) Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City flattened three buildings and killed at least 26 people Sunday, medics said, making it the deadliest single attack since heavy fighting broke out between Israel and the territory’s militant Hamas rulers nearly a week ago. The Gaza Health Ministry said 10 women and eight children were among those killed, with another 50 people wounded in the attack. Rescuers raced to pull survivors and bodies from the rubble. Earlier, the Israeli military said it destroyed the home of Gaza’s top Hamas leader in a separate strike in the southern town of Khan Younis. It was the third such attack in the last two days on the homes of senior Hamas leaders. Israel appears to have stepped up strikes in recent days to inflict as much damage as possible on Hamas as international mediators try to broker a cease-fire.

With strikes targeting rockets and tunnels, the Israeli tactic of ‘mowing the grass’ returns to Gaza (Washington Post) For more than a decade, when analysts described the strategy utilized by Israel against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, they’ve used a metaphor: With their displays of overwhelming military strength, Israeli forces were “mowing the grass.” The phrase implies the Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip and their supply of crude but effective homemade weapons are like weeds that need to be cut back. But the long-term benefits of the “mow the grass” strategy have come under question. Zehava Galon, a former lawmaker with the leftist Meretz party, wrote for Haaretz that the strategy results in “perpetual war” that forgets “human beings are also able to talk, not only to carry a club.”

Arab World Condemns Israeli Violence but Takes Little Action (NYT) The Arab world is unified in condemning Israeli airstrikes in Gaza and the way the Israeli police invaded Jerusalem’s Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Governments have spoken out, protests have taken place, social media is aflame. But by and large the condemnation is only words, not actions—at least so far. The region’s concerns have shifted since the last major Israeli incursion into Gaza in 2014, with new fears about Iran’s influence, new anxieties about popular unrest in Arab countries and a growing recognition of the reality of Israel in the Arab world. Even those countries that normalized relations with Israel last year—the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco—have all openly criticized Israeli policies and called for support of the Palestinians and the defense of Jerusalem. The escalation of violence has put a great strain on those governments, which had argued that their closer relationship with Israel would help restrain Israeli actions aimed at the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza. “I have not seen any Arab state that has not expressed support for the Palestinians on a rhetorical level, and it would be very difficult for them to say anything otherwise,” said H. A. Hellyer, a scholar of Middle East politics at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. “But what they do about it is very different.”

[jcmarchi]

New Hope for Early Pancreatic Cancer Intervention via AI-based Risk Prediction - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/new-hope-for-early-pancreatic-cancer-intervention-via-ai-based-risk-prediction-technology-org/

New Hope for Early Pancreatic Cancer Intervention via AI-based Risk Prediction - Technology Org

The first documented case of pancreatic cancer dates back to the 18th century. Since then, researchers have undertaken a protracted and challenging odyssey to understand the elusive and deadly disease. To date, there is no better cancer treatment than early intervention. Unfortunately, the pancreas, nestled deep within the abdomen, is particularly elusive for early detection. 

Image credit: MIT CSAIL

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) scientists, alongside Limor Appelbaum, a staff scientist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), were eager to better identify potential high-risk patients. They set out to develop two machine-learning models for early detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common form of the cancer.

To access a broad and diverse database, the team synced up with a federated network company, using electronic health record data from various institutions across the United States. This vast pool of data helped ensure the models’ reliability and generalizability, making them applicable across a wide range of populations, geographical locations, and demographic groups.

The two models — the “PRISM” neural network, and the logistic regression model (a statistical technique for probability), outperformed current methods. The team’s comparison showed that while standard screening criteria identify about 10 percent of PDAC cases using a five-times higher relative risk threshold, Prism can detect 35 percent of PDAC cases at this same threshold. 

Using AI to detect cancer risk is not a new phenomena — algorithms analyze mammograms, CT scans for lung cancer, and assist in the analysis of Pap smear tests and HPV testing, to name a few applications. “The PRISM models stand out for their development and validation on an extensive database of over 5 million patients, surpassing the scale of most prior research in the field,” says Kai Jia, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), MIT CSAIL affiliate, and first author on an open-access paper in eBioMedicine outlining the new work.

“The model uses routine clinical and lab data to make its predictions, and the diversity of the U.S. population is a significant advancement over other PDAC models, which are usually confined to specific geographic regions, like a few health-care centers in the U.S. Additionally, using a unique regularization technique in the training process enhanced the models’ generalizability and interpretability.” 

“This report outlines a powerful approach to use big data and artificial intelligence algorithms to refine our approach to identifying risk profiles for cancer,” says David Avigan, a Harvard Medical School professor and the cancer center director and chief of hematology and hematologic malignancies at BIDMC, who was not involved in the study. “This approach may lead to novel strategies to identify patients with high risk for malignancy that may benefit from focused screening with the potential for early intervention.” 

Prismatic perspectives

The journey toward the development of PRISM began over six years ago, fueled by firsthand experiences with the limitations of current diagnostic practices. “Approximately 80-85 percent of pancreatic cancer patients are diagnosed at advanced stages, where cure is no longer an option,” says senior author Appelbaum, who is also a Harvard Medical School instructor as well as radiation oncologist. “This clinical frustration sparked the idea to delve into the wealth of data available in electronic health records (EHRs).”

The CSAIL group’s close collaboration with Appelbaum made it possible to understand the combined medical and machine learning aspects of the problem better, eventually leading to a much more accurate and transparent model. “The hypothesis was that these records contained hidden clues — subtle signs and symptoms that could act as early warning signals of pancreatic cancer,” she adds. “This guided our use of federated EHR networks in developing these models, for a scalable approach for deploying risk prediction tools in health care.”

Both PrismNN and PrismLR models analyze EHR data, including patient demographics, diagnoses, medications, and lab results, to assess PDAC risk. PrismNN uses artificial neural networks to detect intricate patterns in data features like age, medical history, and lab results, yielding a risk score for PDAC likelihood. PrismLR uses logistic regression for a simpler analysis, generating a probability score of PDAC based on these features. Together, the models offer a thorough evaluation of different approaches in predicting PDAC risk from the same EHR data.

One paramount point for gaining the trust of physicians, the team notes, is better understanding how the models work, known in the field as interpretability. The scientists pointed out that while logistic regression models are inherently easier to interpret, recent advancements have made deep neural networks somewhat more transparent. This helped the team to refine the thousands of potentially predictive features derived from EHR of a single patient to approximately 85 critical indicators. These indicators, which include patient age, diabetes diagnosis, and an increased frequency of visits to physicians, are automatically discovered by the model but match physicians’ understanding of risk factors associated with pancreatic cancer. 

The path forward

Despite the promise of the PRISM models, as with all research, some parts are still a work in progress. U.S. data alone are the current diet for the models, necessitating testing and adaptation for global use. The path forward, the team notes, includes expanding the model’s applicability to international datasets and integrating additional biomarkers for more refined risk assessment.

“A subsequent aim for us is to facilitate the models’ implementation in routine health care settings. The vision is to have these models function seamlessly in the background of health care systems, automatically analyzing patient data and alerting physicians to high-risk cases without adding to their workload,” says Jia. “A machine-learning model integrated with the EHR system could empower physicians with early alerts for high-risk patients, potentially enabling interventions well before symptoms manifest. We are eager to deploy our techniques in the real world to help all individuals enjoy longer, healthier lives.” 

Written by Rachel Gordon

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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[96thdayofrage]

Researchers modeled the impact of structural racism on viral transmission and disease impact in the state of Louisiana.

The higher burden of SARS-CoV-2 infection among Black people also amplified the virus's spread in the wider population.

Reparations could have reduced SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the overall population by as much as 68 percent.

Compared with white people, Black individuals in the United States are more likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, more likely to end up in the hospital with COVID-19, and more likely to die from the disease.

Civil rights activists have long called for monetary reparations to the Black descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States as a financial, moral, and ethical form of restitution for the injustices of slavery.

Now, a study led by Harvard Medical School researchers suggests reparations could also have surprising public health benefits for Black individuals and the entire nation.

To estimate the impact of structural inequities between Black and white individuals, the researchers set out to capture the effect of reparation payments on the Black-white wealth gap in the state of Louisiana.

Their analysis, published online on Feb. 9 in Social Science & Medicine, suggests that if reparations had been made before the COVID-19 pandemic, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the state's overall population could have been reduced by anywhere from 31 percent to 68 percent.

The work was done in collaboration with The Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.

"While there are compelling moral and historical arguments for racial-injustice interventions such as reparations, our study demonstrates that repairing the damage caused by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow racism would have enormous benefits to the entire population of the United States," said study senior author Eugene Richardson, assistant professor of global health and social medicine in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School.

The disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on racial minorities—Black individuals in particular—have been well documented. Black people get COVID-19 at a rate nearly one and a half times higher than that of white people, are hospitalized at a rate nearly four times higher, and are three times as likely to die from the disease, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

The greater disease burden among Black people has caused tremendous loss of life and unspeakable suffering across these already vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. Notably, these effects have also spilled over and are driving transmission rates of the virus in the overall population, the study authors said.

Addressing the structural inequalities at the roots of this disparity through monetary reparations would not only radically decrease the impact of COVID-19 among the people who received reparations, the authors said, but would reduce the overall toll of the disease on a broader scale, benefiting the entire population.

The findings, the researchers said, powerfully underscores the truly global nature of the pandemic and the notion that a society is only as strong as its most vulnerable members.

"If we extrapolate these results to the entire United States, we can imagine that tens or hundreds of thousands of lives would have been spared, and the entire nation would have been saved much of the hardship it has endured in the last year," said Richardson, who is also the chair of The Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.

For their analysis, the researchers paired sophisticated data analytics and computational tools with commonly used epidemiologic modeling methods to calculate the impact of structural racism on infection rates among Black and white populations in Louisiana. They chose Louisiana as an exemplar of the impacts of structural racism in the U.S. because it was one of the few states that reported infection rates by race in the early stages of the pandemic. For a control group, the researchers chose the relatively egalitarian population of South Korea.

The researchers noted that although modeling is used to understand many factors in the spread of an infectious disease, such as differences in infection risk based on whether passengers on a train sit with windows open or closed or individual variations in mask-wearing habits, it has rarely been used to capture the effects of social factors that can create vast disparities between populations, such as those seen between Blacks and whites in the U.S.

Richardson's recent book Epidemic Illusions explores the ways conventional epidemiology is constrained from proposing solutions that address the root causes of health disparities derived from the combined weight of centuries of racism, imperialism, neoliberal politics, and economic exploitation. One of the goals of the paper is to challenge the narrow ways people who work in medicine and public health measure and think about problems and solutions and to broaden the public imagination, thus opening new conversations about what challenges and opportunities are worth considering in global health and social science, Richardson said.

The study examined the initial period of the outbreak, before infection control measures were implemented, so any differences in infection rates between populations at that time would have been driven mainly by differences in the social structures, the researchers said.

For example, Louisiana has a population heavily segregated by race, with Black people having higher levels of overcrowded housing and working jobs that are more likely to expose them to SARS-CoV-2 than white people. In comparison, South Korea has a more homogenous population with far less segregation.

To probe how such structural inequities impact transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the researchers examined infection rates over time for the first two months of the epidemic in each location. During the initial phase of the outbreak in Louisiana, each infected person spread the virus to1.3 to 2.5 more people than an infected individual during the same phase of the outbreak in South Korea, the analysis showed. The study also showed it took Louisiana more than twice as long to bring the early wave of the epidemic under control as South Korea.

Next, the researchers used next-generation matrices to gauge how overcrowding, segregation, and the wealth gap between Blacks and whites in Louisiana could have driven higher infection rates and how monetary reparations would affect viral transmission.

The model showed that greater equity between Blacks and whites might have reduced infection transmission rates by anywhere from 31 percent to 68 percent for every person in the state.

This research comes at a time when many Americans are already thinking about the larger societal costs of structural racism, the researchers said. They noted, for example, that the nationwide movement to protest police brutality against Black people has been fueled by many of the inequitable outcomes exemplified so painfully by the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.

"This moment has made it possible for a lot of people who had no reason to think about these inequalities to be very aware of them," said study co-author and Lancet reparations commissioner Kirsten Mullen, who was a member of concept development team for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Anti-racism in action

Richardson said that the research was designed to explore how reparations payments might have altered the trajectory of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. and how a different response to the disease could have helped mitigate the disparities fueled by social conditions that are vestiges of slavery. Such conditions, Richardson noted, include ongoing discrimination and structural racism in the form of redlining, overcrowding, over-incarceration, and the heightened use of lethal force in policing experienced by Black people.

Richardson said that historian and anti-racist scholar Ibram X. Kendi's description of the differences between racism and anti-racism were helpful in designing the study. According to Kendi, a racist policy is any policy that produces or sustains inequality or promotes the power of one racial group over another, whereas an anti-racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains equity between racial groups.

Richardson said that one important goal of the project was to attempt to harness the power of mathematical modeling for an anti-racist response to the coronavirus and beyond.

"When you look at a formula for transmissibility, it looks like an objective calculation," he said. "But where is lethal policing in that formula?"

Richardson noted that it was important to call attention to the systemic and structural elements of racism that can get lost in simplified models of disease.

What are reparations?

Mullen and study co-author William Darity, who recently published a book on reparations and have written in the press about the case for using reparation payments to fight COVID-19, defined reparations as a program of acknowledgement, redress, and closure for a grievous injustice. In this case, Mullen said, the atrocities are associated with periods of enslavement, legal segregation and white terrorism during the Jim Crow era, and racial strife and violence of the post-Civil Rights Act era, including ongoing inequities in the form of over-policing, police executions of unarmed Black people, ongoing discrimination in regard to incarceration, access to housing, and, possibly most important, the Black-white gulf in wealth.

Successful reparations programs include three elements: admission of culpability on behalf of the perpetrators of the atrocity; redress, in the form of an act of restitution; and closure, wherein the victims agree that the debt is paid and no further claims are to be made unless new harms are inflicted.

In this case, Mullen said, reparations would take the form of financial restitution for living Black individuals who can show that they are descended from at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the U.S. and that they self-identified as Black on a legal document at some point during the 12 years prior.

The financial restitution is designed to help close the Black-white wealth gap. Darity noted that it is important to distinguish wealth from income. Wealth is how much you own, and income is how much you earn. Greater wealth translates to greater stability for individuals and families across time. Greater wealth is also more strongly associated with greater well-being than greater income, Darity said, and disparities in wealth manifest as health disparities.

"Wealth is more strongly associated with familial or individual well-being," said Darity, who is the Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University and a Lancet reparations commissioner. He noted that, according to the Federal Reserve Board 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, the average Black household had a net worth $800,000 lower than the average white household, and that Black people, who represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, only own 3 percent of the nation's wealth.

"This dramatically restricts the ability of Black Americans to survive and thrive," Darity said.

To assess the effect of reparation payments on the trajectory of the pandemic, the researchers based their calculations on a model that would pay $250,000 per person or $800,000 per household to descendants of enslaved individuals—one of several proposed reparation models.

Every transmission is a social transmission

"Every transmission has a social cause," said study co-author and Lancet reparations commissioner James Jones, associate professor of Earth System Science and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.

For a brief moment when AIDS was in the spotlight during the late 80s and early 90s, people interested in social behavior became interested in mathematical modeling of disease, Jones said. While that interest largely waned, the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the need to think about social science, inequality, social structure, behavior patterns, and behavior change, as well as how they fit together with how we understand and respond to epidemics, Jones said.

Even the simplest model must account for a rudimentary social structure, Jones said. At its most basic, this can be represented with a generalized estimate of how likely an infected person is to come into contact with a susceptible person. He explained that this number, R0 or "R-naught," is the average number of people an infected individual transmits the virus to. When R0 is less than one, no epidemic is possible because the number of people infected decreases. When R0 is greater than 1 an epidemic is possible. R0 also determines the total number of people who could potentially become infected or how many people would need to be vaccinated to end the epidemic. It can also be used to calculate the so-called endemic equilibrium—which determines whether a disease will continue to exist within a population, simmering constantly in the background or bubbling up seasonally, like influenza.

"That's the theory of infectious disease control in a single parameter," Jones said.

That seeming simplicity can make it hard to focus on the complex ways that infectious diseases move through the real world, the researchers said.

"It's important to highlight that R0 is not simply a function of the pathogen," Jones said. "It's a function of the society." Social and environmental factors like mobility, segregation, and the nature of the built environment help determine rates of infection, he said.

This is one important reason that diseases don't hit all people the same. Global R0 is an average of very different R0s for different groups of people. Some groups are more likely to interact only with members of their own group, some groups are more likely to come in contact with infected people, and some are more susceptible to the disease for other reasons, Jones said.

In this case, the researchers used mathematical models to help understand the differences in R0 for Black people and white people in Louisiana and to help think about how things would change if racism were less prevalent in America.

Absent those interventions, the researchers noted that Black Americans remain at an elevated and inequitable risk of becoming infected and dying during the COVID-19 pandemic and that this inequity will continue to fuel the pandemic for all Americans.

"Increasing equality would have huge benefits on infection rates for everyone," said co-author Momin Malik, who was a data science postdoctoral fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University at the time the study was conducted.

[charlemontmeditationtrainin-blog]

A Simple, Effective Way to Ease Stress and Anxiety

Americans work longer hours, take fewer vacations, and retire later than anyone in the industrialized world. It is no wonder we are among the most stressed-out people on the planet. We also have a bad habit of dealing with the pressure and anxiety we encounter in unhealthy ways. We eat too much and drink too much and pretend we're in control. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Medication nation

In an effort to deal with agitation and unease, more and more Americans are turning to prescription pills. Brands like Zoloft, Paxil, and Cymbalta have become household names, with Americans spending tens of billions of dollars each year on drugs designed to treat anxiety and depression. But like all prescription medications, these powerful mood-altering drugs have a laundry list of unpleasant side effects, from nausea and insomnia to fatigue and sexual dysfunction. There must be a better way...

Meditation nation

The one silver lining in an otherwise ominous sky is the recent rediscovery of an ancient form of stress relief. Whether used for spiritual enlightenment or emotional healing, meditation has been a part of human history for thousands of years. Although it originated in Asia, meditation is now universal, appearing in cultures the world over. With that said, the practice is less popular in the Western world, where it has struggled to gain mainstream acceptance... Until recently, that is.

According to a 2007 U.S. Census Bureau Survey, nearly 10 percent of the adult population practices some form of meditation, up from only 8 percent in 2002. As a result, a growing number of yoga schools and medical centers are opening their doors to the 20-plus million Americans who use meditation on a regular basis.

Research findings

Although Western medicine has long questioned the benefits of meditation, it has been forced to reevaluate its position in recent years as scientific evidence of meditation's healthfulness has come to light. In one study completed at Johns Hopkins University, researchers found that meditation helped relieve anxiety, pain, and moderate depression in some patients. Another study found a 10 to 20 percent improvement in symptoms of depression for subjects who meditated regularly. Those numbers are similar to the positive effects of antidepressants, with far fewer side effects!

What is meditation?

Most Westerners have only a vague idea of what meditation is and how it works. They might know, for instance, that it involves concentrated focus upon a sound, object, movement, etc. in order to increase awareness of the present moment. While others believe that meditation consists of simply clearing the mind and shutting the world out. And the truth is that both of those opinions are correct. Meditation can involve deep thinking or almost no thinking at all. Some of the most common ways to meditate include:

· Guided meditation: Also known as visualization or guided imagery, this popular method of meditation involves relaxing mental images of places and situations. Practitioners are instructed to incorporate as many of their senses as possible, including sights, smells, sounds, and textures of soothing objects and environments. Because it takes time to paint a comforting mental picture, newcomers may benefit from expert instruction by a teacher or guide.

· Mindfulness meditation: Rather than trying to escape from ourselves or our current predicament, this type of meditation helps us increase our awareness by living in the moment. How? During a mindfulness meditation session, you focus on what you experience, such as your breathing, passing thoughts, or emotions. However, you do not linger on the details of any of them, but rather let them pass without judgment.

· Mantra meditation: Popular in the Buddhist faith, when used for relaxation purposes mantra meditation consists of simply repeating a calming word or phrase to keep distracting thoughts at bay. Although this simple technique can be practiced anytime, anywhere, it can take many months of practice to stop your mind from wandering during mantra recitations. Beginners are instructed to focus intently on the sound of their own voices in order to block out everything else.

· Transcendent meditation: One of the most widely practiced forms of meditation, the transcendent variety also involves mantras. What distinguishes it from the aforementioned technique is that the mantra recitations are not used to block everything out, but rather to slow mental functioning to relaxing levels. At last count, more than 10 million people practiced transcendent meditation around the world.

· Heart rhythm meditation: With a focus on controlled breathing, this method seeks to coordinate the breath and the heartbeat to reduce anxiety and stress. Practitioners utilize several different rhythmic breathing patterns where inhalations and exhalations are made at equal intervals and beats. For example, the "swinging breath" method features 8 beats in and 8 beats out. Use of full lung capacity is imperative, as is concentration on the heartbeat, which should slow with breathing into more consistent patterns.

Yoga: Although it is not the focus of the discipline, meditation is involved in most yoga exercises and techniques. From breathing exercises to stretches and poses, yogis and their students use meditation to develop more flexible bodies and calm minds. Balance and concentration is achieved by focusing on the moment and shutting out the world for awhile. Those who are able to master basic meditation techniques generally progress more rapidly in yoga training for those very reasons.

Tai chi: Probably the most active way to achieve relaxation through meditation, tai chi is a gentle Chinese martial art that consists of a series of slow, graceful movements that are performed while practicing deep breathing. Commonly referred to as moving meditation, tai chi promotes both physical and mental relaxation. The popular Chinese pastime has also be shown to increase concentration and focus in those who suffer from anxiety disorders.

Common features

Generally speaking, meditation is an umbrella term that describes any type of focused activity that helps produce a state of deep relaxation. So while there may be different ways of getting there, all types of meditation share the following features:

· Focused attention: A fundamental component of meditation, focusing your attention on a sound, image, or activity helps clear the mind, which can produce a state of profound relaxation.

· Deep breathing: One of the simplest and most effective ways to relax is to simply take deep, slow breaths from the abdomen. This helps reduce the movement of the neck, shoulder, and upper chest by shifting it to the diaphragm, where it belongs. It also helps the lungs take in more oxygen, which has a calming effect on the body and mind.

· A quiet environment. If your goal is to quiet your mind, it helps to be in a silent setting with few distractions. For obvious reasons, we strongly suggest that you keep cell phones, computers, TVs, and other electronics out of these areas.

· A comfortable position. Some types of meditation are quite strict about body positioning, while others are far less formal. When practicing on your own, use a comfortable position that helps you get the most out of your meditation.

Health benefits

As different as they may be, all of the aforementioned techniques can help you achieve inner peace. This state of calm and repose has salubrious effects that go far beyond stress reduction and anxiety relief. When practiced on a regular basis, people who meditate report the following health benefits:

· Lower blood pressure

· Reduction of negative emotions

· Less fear and anxiety

· Better stress management skills

· Improved mental concentration and focus

· Better sleep

· Decreased muscle tension

· More energy

· Better memory

· Fewer colds and minor illnesses

Daily meditation

One of the most appealing aspects of meditation is that it can be practiced wherever you are - whether at home, at work, or on the road. But to get the maximum possible benefits of meditation, we recommend daily sessions for improved physical and emotional wellbeing. With that in mind, here are a few simple ways you can practice meditation on your own.

Breathing. Whether it lasts ten minutes or two hours, breathing in and out in a slow, controlled way can help relieve stress and anxiety and promote healthy sleep.

Progressive muscle relaxation. A slightly more advanced technique, progressive relaxation involves focusing your attention on certain parts of your body, particularly on sore or tense areas such as the hands or feet, to provide relief. When combined with deep breathing, it has an impressive track record.

Repeat a mantra. Focusing on the sound your own voice as you repeat a certain word or phrase to relax is a time-test technique that crosses many different cultures, religions, and healing disciplines. You are free to create your own mantra or to pick a popular one from an established form of mantra meditation, such as transcendent meditation.

Walk and meditate. A healthy and efficient way to unwind, combining walking with meditation helps clear the mind and cleanse the body at the same time. One easy way to accomplish this is to focus on your body's movements instead of on the destination. Slow the pace a bit and breathe deeply as you step to get the most out of your daily constitutional.

[sciencespies]

The Push for Tidal Power Faces Its Biggest Challenge Yet

https://sciencespies.com/nature/the-push-for-tidal-power-faces-its-biggest-challenge-yet/

The Push for Tidal Power Faces Its Biggest Challenge Yet

It’s a glorious autumn morning on Brier Island, Nova Scotia, with birdsong in the air and the sun glinting off the rips of Grand Passage. Weathered clapboard and shingled houses line the island’s two principal streets, and chubby workboats—built for lobstering, mostly—jam the protected harbor, where wharves loom more than 20 feet above low tide.

Grand Passage appears almost empty on this day, except for the car ferry yo-yoing back and forth between Brier Island and Long Island, its two 400-horsepower engines roaring. But as I come around a bend, I spy a sleek yellow-and-white vessel, not half a mile from shore, pinned smack in the middle of the notoriously swift current. Though the craft has three narrow hulls, and what look like four giant propellers, it’s not a boat. It is a power plant capable of producing nearly 280 kilowatts of carbon-free electricity.

I hurry down to the harbor to meet Jason Hayman and Jason Clarkson, who work for Sustainable Marine Energy (SME), the Scotland-based company that developed this nifty device. We board their workboat, SMEagol, named after the deranged Hobbit, and head out into the current. I ask Hayman about the trimaran’s name—Plat-I, or “plat-eye.”

The view off Cape Split, Scots Bay, in the heart of the Bay of Fundy.

(Greta Rybus)

“We’re engineers,” he says, laughing. “‘Plat’ stands for platform, and ‘I’ is for inshore, meaning the device will be moored in sheltered island sites or coastal passages.” (The Plat-I’s predecessor was the Plat-0, for “offshore,” but the development team preferred to pronounce it like the Greek philosopher.)

We tie up to the Plat, then pick our way, clinging to a skinny lifeline, across its 88-foot-long crossbeam—a metal catwalk. “When there’s a little bit of a swell it can really mess with your head,” Hayman says.

Along the craft’s stern are four rotors, two barely visible in the water and two pivoted, for inspection purposes, toward the sky. At the Plat-I’s slender bow, stout cables tether the craft, through a mooring turret, to the seabed, allowing it to pivot on the tide, generating energy on both ebb and flow. “We survived the 140-kilometer winds of Hurricane Dorian,” Hayman says, in a tone suggesting that outcome wasn’t guaranteed.

The ebb and flow of the sea in the Bay of Fundy shapes the landscape, leaving mud flats on the shores of the Minas Basin at low tide.

(Greta Rybus)

Crowded into a shipping container perched on the Plat’s center hull, we gaze at video monitors that show the underwater rotors, and Hayman opens three steel cabinets to reveal inverters, transformers and other electronics gear that, using a computer program the team calls its “secret sauce,” processes the water-generated electrical current to match the 60-hertz heartbeat of the local power grid. Apparently, any fool can produce electricity; making it usable is another matter entirely.

Sometime this summer, Hayman plans to flip a switch that will send juice generated by the device into the Digby Neck grid, displacing a chunk of the coal that provides about half of Nova Scotia’s energy. At that moment this unprepossessing rig, which from a distance looks like a dismasted trimaran awaiting restoration, will become the only operational floating tidal energy plant in North America.

Tidal energy is one of the greatest untapped renewable sources on the planet. In the United States, with thousands of miles of coastline, developing just 5 percent of tidal energy’s “identified technical resource potential,” says the Department of Energy, would generate 12.5 terawatts per year. That’s enough to power slightly more than 1.1 million typical U.S. homes. But if tidal power evolves the way wind has, that number will likely rise. Over the decades, better designs have allowed wind turbines to generate, economically, in ever less-windy places. Tidal turbines, too, could eventually be placed in ever less-speedy currents. The market, says Levi Kilcher, of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, “will end up being much larger than we’ve identified so far.”

Renewable. Nonpolluting. It works in the dark, unlike solar power. And in a calm, unlike wind power. SME’s floating tidal power station is gearing up to go online in Nova Scotia.

The Plat-I may seem like a tiny part of this energy revolution, an obscure project in a remote spot, but it may be just what the future requires: a simple and replicable energy source, tailored to the local environment, with batteries or other energy-storage systems to keep the power flowing during slack tides. After all, around 40 percent of the U.S. population lives in counties along the coast, and tidal devices could also be used in rivers.

Before Hayman���s company can start churning out Plat replicants, though, he must first overcome a monstrous challenge: operating his technology 140 miles to the northeast, in the funnel-shaped Bay of Fundy, which has the world’s largest tidal range—54 feet. Through the bay passes, twice daily, more than four times the estimated combined flow of every river on earth. That huge mass of water can move at more than ten miles an hour and has the potential to generate 50,000 megawatts, which is by some estimates enough to power 15 million homes. The Bay of Fundy is the ultimate test for any ocean-energy entrepreneur, and for a century inventors have been experimenting in its treacherous waters. But the bay is littered with disasters.

* * *

Hayman, 43, came to tidal power in the roundabout way of a sailor. Born in New Zealand to a mother who owned a travel agency and a father who researched dairy cow genetics, Hayman started messing around with boats early: In the summertime, his parents parked him at a local sailing club. He left college as a freshman when his uncle asked him to deliver a sailboat partway up the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. “After that I was hooked,” Hayman says.

A bold approach to generating clean electricity faces the ultimate test –the greatest tide on earth.

(Greta Rybus)

He worked on boats all over the world, including Antarctica. He developed and built racing boats in the Bahamas, where he also converted America’s Cup yachts to racing charters and operated a ferry business. But he realized that if he didn’t want to spend his entire life sanding fiberglass and humping sails up and down decks, he needed a college degree. At age 25, Hayman went ashore in England to study naval architecture at Newcastle University, then earned a master’s in engineering for sustainable development at the University of Cambridge. Soon he was working on floating production tankers, designing heavy-lifting equipment for the oil and gas industry, and doing marine salvage.

“Things that float need a naval architect,” Hayman says. One calls in a naval architect to safely lower large objects to the seabed, and to lift foundered vessels without breaking them up, he explains. In 2011, Hayman found himself in a helicopter speeding over the Borneo rainforest. He’d been dispatched to the region to extract a cargo ship grounded off Samarinda. A horrifying glimpse out the helicopter window changed the course of his life. “I saw thousands of acres of bulldozed tropical rainforest, and I asked the pilot what was going on,” Hayman recalls. “He said they’d been extracting coal from the area for five years. And I thought, Wow, that’s so much destruction in such a short amount of time.” Coal filled the hold of the ship he was about to rescue.

Wouldn’t it be better, he thought, to generate carbon-free energy from the movement of the sea than to dig it from the earth? One could avoid both the dangerous transport of fossil fuels and the outsize environmental impacts of extracting as well as burning them. “People are fixated on greenhouse gas emissions,” Hayman says, referring to the back end of a linear process. “But they are unaware of what it takes to generate energy up front.” After resurrecting the ship in Borneo, Hayman devoted himself to generating power from tides.

In the tidal flats between Greenwich and Port Williams, Nova Scotia, the tides have 40-foot ranges.

(Greta Rybus)

Most of us understand, on a basic level, that tides rise and fall in response to the Moon and the Sun’s gravitational pull on the oceans. But the nuances of tides are fantastically complex, and they remain slightly mysterious even to the learned. Tidal idiosyncrasies abound: Some places, like the Gulf of Mexico, see one high tide a day, instead of the more usual two, while others see four. As Jonathan White notes in his excellent Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean, astronomers know exactly how celestial bodies affect tides, but what actually happens to water down here on earth “is unimaginably messy. Scientists are still working it out.”

All told, some 400 different variables are involved in creating the tides, but you don’t have to account for each and every one to appreciate that harnessing energy from this perpetual motion machine is an extremely good idea. The resource is clean, inexhaustible and, to an extent that even solar and wind are not, highly predictable.

Humans have derived power from the ocean for more than a millennium, trapping high tides in mill ponds behind dams, then releasing the flow at low tide through sluiceways directed at the paddles of waterwheels. The motion generated enough force to turn grinding stones or other mechanical devices. The first tidal mill in North America was built in 1607, in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, some 60 miles from Grand Passage. Tidal mills were common throughout the province and the eastern U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it was in the 20th century that the Bay of Fundy became tidal engineering’s crucible of experimentation.

* * *

In 1915, Ralph Clarkson, an engineering professor at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University, prototyped a tidal-power generator with four pumps, powered by a horizontal waterwheel, that lifted water 335 feet into two tanks atop the Cape Split headland. The stored water ran down a tube to a conventional hydroelectric turbine at the base of the cliffs. The scheme attracted investors, but in 1920 a fire destroyed all of Clarkson’s equipment. The project never recovered.

Not long after that, Dexter Cooper, a hydraulic engineer in Maine, drew up plans for three dams, spanning a total of more than 7,000 feet, that would trap high tides in Passamaquoddy Bay, creating an upper pool that spread over 100 square miles. Upon release into the lower pool of Cobscook Bay, which covered another 41 square miles, the water would generate 345,000 kilowatts of power. With the encouragement of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Cooper’s summertime neighbor on Campobello Island, and over the objections of fishermen, who feared that turbines would turn the bay to bouillabaisse, the Public Works Administration in 1935 began building two dams, plus worker housing, near Eastport, Maine. But further studies revealed there wasn’t enough local demand for the power after all, and steam and conventional hydropower plants could generate electricity far more cheaply. By 1936 the project ground to a halt. It revived, zombielike, for another look under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and again under John F. Kennedy. Every study reached the same conclusion: DOA.

In 1980, Nova Scotia Power began to convert a causeway spanning the tidal Annapolis River into North America’s first grid-connected tidal dam, or barrage. A hybrid of ancient tidal mill and modern hydroelectric plant, the barrage featured a four-bladed turbine 25 feet in diameter. On an outgoing tide, the device generated up to 20 megawatts. It operated for 35 years—but not without controversy. The barrage blocked fish migration and killed some salmon and mackerel, trapped marine mammals, interfered with nutrient and sediment flows, and contributed to erosion. In January 2019, a mechanical problem shuttered the Annapolis tidal barrage, succeeding where decades of environmental opposition had failed.

* * *

When Sustainable Marine Energy first formed, in Scotland in 2012, it focused on providing power at utility scale, often defined as delivering at least a megawatt into the existing grid. “That was the big prize,” Hayman says. But when Britain decreased its subsidies for tidal power, SME began looking for other markets. “Our ‘aha’ moment was realizing that no one had done a simple thing well,” Hayman continues. “There were hundreds of island communities running on imported diesel” that were blessed with sheltered coastal sites, high tides and fast currents. Appropriately scaled tidal power, he figured, could help them kick their expensive fossil fuel habit, reduce the environmental risk of fuel spills and make them more resilient in the face of extreme events, like tsunamis or hurricanes.

Researchers conduct studies on the ocean’s tidal power at the Aquatron Laboratory at Dalhousie University.

(Greta Rybus)

The on-land energy transfer station at the Fundy Ocean Research Center for Energy (FORCE) lab in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia.

(Greta Rybus)

SME first tested the Plat-I in western Scotland’s Connel Sound, then eventually shipped the parts to Nova Scotia, which supported tidal energy projects. The company chose Grand Passage for its New World debut because the channel’s bathymetry is known, the water runs fast and clear, and the site is easily accessed. But Brier Island, population 168, also aligns with Hayman’s broader aim of servicing remote islands and other coastal areas. “The Faroe Islands are a prime candidate for floating tidal,” Hayman says aboard SMEagol. “The Philippines have great currents, British Columbia’s Discovery Passage, the Channel Islands, villages in Indonesia and Korea…” Hayman’s mental globe-spinning may seem grandiose. But wind and solar power also seemed fringy and, to many, a little absurd just two generations ago. Now those technologies are downright mainstream, providing almost a tenth of U.S. power, at competitive prices, and growing fast.

In Grand Passage, SME has demonstrated that a floating platform has major advantages over tidal power’s other main design option—a turbine anchored to the seafloor. Platforms are far cheaper to build and install than bottom-mounted devices (and remove, should things go wrong). And a technician can perform routine maintenance on a platform-mounted turbine during slack tide. “A visit from a lobster boat will do,” Hayman says. Attending to devices on the sea bottom, in comparison, may require a submersible vehicle or a heavy barge with a lifting rig.

With my eye on the yellow fairings that smooth the flow rushing past the Plat-I’s tri-bladed rotors, I ask Hayman if his multimillion-dollar equipment might be in harm’s way. No, he says: Dangerously high currents, ice chunks and debris kick the turbines up and out of the water. And because SME designed the rotors to swing up independently, maintenance can be performed without taking the whole device offline, so it continues to generate revenue.

(Guilbert Gates)

Proponents of in-stream tidal—that is, with turbines located in the water column, not embedded in dams—claim marine mammals and fin fish can easily avoid the blades because nothing impedes the animals’ passage. During a 2017 pilot study that introduced striped bass to a spinning turbine in a circular tank at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, fish appeared to avoid the blades, even with the current moving at 3.9 knots. These results “will inform real-world scenarios,” says Sue Molloy, who conducted the study, “and some tests that are done with wild-caught fish will translate very well.”

A study of SeaGen, the world’s first large-scale tidal-stream generator, which operated commercially between 2008 and 2016 in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough, suggested that seals avoid moving rotors. In a multiyear pilot study of three riverbed-mounted tidal turbines in New York City’s East River—a demonstration project run by Verdant Power—researchers found no evidence of harm to fish.

Environmental monitoring in Grand Passage, Hayman says, has yielded no evidence that marine animals, save jellyfish, touched Plat’s turbines. Still, as one so often hears when discussing potential environmental impacts, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.

The Plat-I generator, with one turbine lifted out of the water, floats in Grand Passage, a channel with a swift tide stream.

(Greta Rybus)

Monitoring the environment around turbines is difficult and expensive. “It’s a highly dynamic environment with lots of turbulence and sediment in the water that hinders visibility,” Anna Redden, a marine ecologist at Acadia University’s Tidal Energy Institute, told me when we met in her office. Air bubbles interfere with acoustic signal detection, as do the engines of seafaring vessels and the whir and blip of other monitoring equipment. Because lights could attract or repel marine life, cameras can record only in daylight hours. Tidal platforms are designed to work in strong currents, but sensors are not. “We’re using off-the-shelf technology that isn’t designed for washing machines.”

I asked Redden what science did know about marine life and turbines. “Nothing for sure,” she said. “And we won’t know if these turbines kill fish until the device is in the water” for a significant amount of time. She paused, then said with a note of tristesse, “There is never zero impact. But what level of impact will we find acceptable?”

* * *

There are tides in tidal power development. Flows correspond with spikes in the price of oil, investor interest and government subsidies that help tidal power compete with wind and solar, which are cheaper. The recent burst of activity in Nova Scotia was sparked by the global climate emergency and Canada’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2030, compared with 2005 levels. (Nova Scotia has already reduced emissions 31 percent, thanks in part to its own wind turbines and to renewable energy imported from Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Quebec.)

But interest in tidal power also ebbs, such as when heralded projects fail. In 2009, Nova Scotia Power partnered with the Dublin-based company OpenHydro to lower a six-story-high, 400-ton circular turbine into Minas Passage. Within days, the current ripped the device apart. In glass-half-full mode, engineers acknowledged they’d underestimated the tide’s force. The company tried again seven years later, with an 1,100-ton model. It generated two megawatts until the company extracted the device for repair and upgrades, seven months into the experiment. In 2018, another turbine was lowered into the passage. But within days, OpenHydro’s investors pulled out, and the company filed for bankruptcy. The turbine rests on the seafloor to this day.

The Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE), an international test site for tidal-energy development in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, occupies a glassy building overlooking Minas Passage. Researchers estimate that the waterway’s fast-moving tidal currents could generate 2,500 megawatts—enough to power all of Nova Scotia, home to nearly a million people—and displace up to nine million tons of greenhouse gases. One of the great advantages of tidal power is the density of the kinetic energy itself; a solar-energy project in Morocco that produces 580 megawatts covers as much ground as roughly 3,500 football fields.

Established in 2008 and mostly government-funded, FORCE is the manifestation of Nova Scotia’s tidal dreams; it’s a generator of tidal-energy research and an operations center for companies testing gear and monitoring sea life. But arguably its most important asset lies underwater, where five so-called berths, each just shy of eight acres, await tidal-turbine tenants. Among those expected to plug into FORCE’s submarine cables, which connect to a nearby electrical substation, is SME.

The dramatic tidal range of the Bay of Fundy is plain in Hall’s Harbour, from the high tide mark on the seawall to the fishing boat resting aground at low tide.

(Greta Rybus)

The village of Westport, on Brier Island, Nova Scotia, has a population of fewer than 200 residents. It is reached by boat or the ferry from Long Island.

(Greta Rybus)

Jason Clarkson had likened the Plat-I to a small turboprop plane. The project that SME hopes to launch in Minas Passage later this year will be more like an Airbus: three platforms, each hosting six turbines. Combined, they will generate 1.26 megawatts. The new venture, a partnership between SME and a Canadian company called Minas Tidal, will be called the “Pempa’q In-Stream Tidal Energy Project.” The word pempa’q means “rising tide” in the local Mi’kmaq language.

From FORCE’s backyard, I scan the silt-rich waters of the passage and focus my binoculars on Cape Split, rising sharply to the southwest. I recall that Nova Scotia had, in an age of ecological innocence (the 1980s), actively considered spanning this waterway with an five-mile-long barrage stuffed with 128 turbines. In comparison, three floating platforms wouldn’t be terribly intrusive. But what about more?

Local fishermen “aren’t worried about one turbine. They are worried about arrays of 300,” Anna Redden, who sits on the board of FORCE, had told me. SME wasn’t the only company prospecting in these currents: FORCE had other tenants moving in, and successful projects always hanker to scale up. “With every doubling of cumulative capacity,” Hayman had told me, “cost to consumers drops by 15 to 20 percent. Pricewise, tidal is where offshore wind was 15 years ago, and solar 10.” If all went well with his three-platform array, he aimed to increase it to 21 and produce almost nine megawatts.

Unlike wind turbines, which have converged on a nearly universal design, tidal turbines still come in many shapes and sizes. Axes of tidal turbines can be vertical or horizontal; the devices resemble tabletop fans, Archimedean screws, the helical blades of push lawn mowers and even wind turbines. (But because water is “approximately 838 times” denser than air, a naval architect can and will tell you, tidal blades can be much smaller than wind blades.) Some turbines operate near the seafloor, others in the middle of the water column or just below the surface. As with any immature technology, projects seem to dip their toes in the water, then retreat for tweaks, a major overhaul, a fresh infusion of cash, or a final journey to the scrap heap.

Down at Brier, the nimble little Plat-I was inching toward the finish line, having avoided so many of those pitfalls. “SME is a success story because they proved they can coexist with fishers, recreational boaters and the ecosystem,” says Terry Thibodeau, the coordinator for renewable energy and climate change at the Municipality of the District of Digby. “They figured out how to moor and pivot their device, and they’ve tested for years.”

If SME’s next generation power plant succeeds in the maw of Minas, one could imagine the company towing parti-colored trimarans to islands and remote coastal sites around the world, fulfilling a particularly satisfying vision of energy independence—one that is hyperlocal, low impact and renewable so long as the Moon continues to circle the Earth.

We won’t know for some time if Hayman will triumph in the Bay of Fundy, but I found myself rooting for this plucky company and its pragmatic leader, who were helping push the world toward a historic moment. In Industrial Age Britain, coal power put water wheels out of business. Now water wheels might help do the same to coal.

#Nature

[yesteachersblog]

An Insightful Interview

In order to expand my own understanding of community building in the classroom setting I decided to reach out to a veteran teacher who I had previously worked under several years ago. Brandon Thompson teaches at Tempe High School in the Tempe Union School District in Arizona. He has been teaching for over 20 years now and has carefully worked to craft an amazing teaching persona and classroom environment, something that I was able to witness firsthand. Mr. Thompson teaches 10th, 11th, and 12th, grade ELA with a mixture of regular, honors and AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) courses. AVID is an organization centered on helping students overcome obstacles throughout their school experience. In their own words “Regardless of their life circumstances, AVID students overcome obstacles and achieve success. They graduate and attend college at higher rates, but more importantly, they can think critically, collaborate, and set high expectations to confidently conquer the challenges that await them. In 47 states across the U.S., K–16 educators are driving student success through engaging, rigorous, and student-centered learning environments.” (https://www.avid.org) Mr. Thompson goes above and beyond for his students to help ensure they are on the right path to success. He is my main inspiration for pursuing a career in education as well as the core of my blog’s principles.

I asked Mr. Thompson a variety of questions all having to do with the communication he uses in his classroom as a teacher, as well as an AVID coordinator. The first thing I wanted to find out was what sort of community was the AVID program and what role did it play in Tempe High School. His response resonated with me deeply, “AVID in a sense is the only path students have to getting into college. We help prepare the students from the moment they enter high school to believe in themselves 100 percent and continuously improve their abilities in all subjects. Not just ELA, but Math teachers, Science, Social Studies, we all work together to guide the students.” (Thompson) For many of these teens, AVID keeps them grounded and out of trouble

As someone who grew up in a low-income community, I didn’t have a lot of guidance for helping me reach college. I know what it’s like out there in these public schools, just how easily a student can fall into the wrong hands and down a path of regret. The AVID program helps to prevent this. Mr. Thompson practices daily writing in all of classes. When prompted with the question “what kind of writing is the most important?” He responded with, “writing that allows students to speak the words they’re unable to speak outside of class, writing to find their voice.” (Thompson) He allows students to keep daily journals in his class not just as reflections of their lives, but in order to communicate with him. He reads their journals weekly and through this system he is able to reach the students better than through direct lecturing. Mr. Thompson mentioned to me how many of these students, especially the younger ones, struggle with direct communication with their teachers. However, through written language they are able to express themselves in a less pressured sense with reassurance that someone on the other end is listening. Peter Drucker establishes that communication is based on perception, expectation, and demand. As Drucker writes in Functioning Communications “Unless there is someone who hears, there is no communication. There is only noise.” (Drucker 262) These students are practicing daily communicating with their peers and with their instructor in order to help prepare them for the outside world.

However, to do so in an effective manner Mr. Thompson is constantly exposing himself to his students to create a shared experience and reassure them that he understands their perceptions. These shared experiences have a lot to do with his background, upbringing, and current lifestyle. Although he is the authoritative figure in the classroom, he first establishes himself as a human who’s endured similar experiences as his students. Tempe High is made up of a 1500 student population; 70 percent Latino,  14 percent Black, 5 percent American Indian, 2 percent Hawaiian, and more (https://www.publicschoolreview.com/tempe-high-school-profile) These demographics are important when taking into consideration students of different cultures, and beliefs. Minority groups are at a higher risk of dropping out of high school, “Minority students dropped out at disproportionately higher rates than their White counterparts — In 2009, 4.8 percent of of blacks and 5.8 percent of Hispanics between 15 and 24 dropped out of grades 10-12, compared with 2.4 percent for white students.” (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/high-school-dropout-rates_n_1022221) In order for teachers to effectively reach their students and help prevent these dropout rates from increasing they need to be careful of the communication practices they are using. This is where Mr. Thompson incorporates AVID into all of his courses. By reassuring his students that despite their background, gender, race, culture, etc., they are still able to work hard and achieve higher education.

Author Craig Smith describes the human myth as a function for establishing society. In his work Rhetoric and Human Consciousness, he writes “Since prehistoric times myths and narratives have been used for entertainment, but they also built tribes, cultures, and nations. Myths were used to advance values and to order lives, villages, and the world.” (Smith 20) Not much has changed since then. There is a common myth amongst the lower-class public-school setting in America. A myth that if you work hard enough in school, you’ll be able to make something great out of yourself. The problem with this myth though, is that it doesn’t take into consideration the many overlining factors that affect a student from reaching their college aspiration goals. No matter how hard a student may work they will never be able to reach that end point of success without the proper guidance.  This is a myth that Mr. Thompson works against daily. I asked him what some of the major struggles are he faces when it comes to written communication in this setting and his response centered the most around overcoming cultural and language barriers. Although any student can enroll in the AVID program this does not take into consideration their academic standing. Meaning, that many of his students are at different reading and writing levels despite being in the same grade. Their first language may not be English, and they may have grown up in a community where reading and writing was not as prioritized a skill as others. It can be difficult at times to make these students understand the importance of written communication, because they’ve never experienced the power their written words can have. Through positive affirmations and practice Mr. Thompson allows the students to breakthrough from this careless mindset and discover the potential they all have, despite how great or how “poorly” they may write. One thing he does that not many other ELA teachers do is allow students to write in their home languages, not just standard academic English. He later makes them translate whatever their writing was, but the principle of allowing them to use this form of written communication allows for all students to participate in the writing experience.

Mr. Thompson has faced a lot of backlash for his teaching methods as they are not seen to be “traditional” in the eyes of other veteran teachers. He is also constantly fighting to receive the necessary funding for his AVID classes. He relies a lot on social media specifically Facebook in order to help reach a larger audience when it comes to communicating issues and reaching out to the community.  The great thing about Facebook he says, is that “almost all parents nowadays have access to it.” Even if they don’t have a computer at home, the school offers technology hours in the library after school where parents or families are able to use the computer lab for a certain amount of time. Through this platform he is able to spread messages about what’s going in class, events, or even ask for funding. The AVID school program has their own Facebook page and allows public access for anyone interested in learning more about the organization. “I would have never imagined I’d become such an active Facebook user, but it helps me stay in touch with the community that my students are a part of.” I asked Mr. Thompson how he works to incorporate social media in his classroom, and he mentioned that he’ll do an end of the year project for students using a social media platform of their choice. Through whichever social media platform, they chose, they are able to bring awareness to a major issue occurring in or outside of the US in an attempt to create a research and project solution. This allows students to realize the importance of online communicating as well as the role social media plays in our daily communications.

After interviewing Branon Thompson I became even more aware of where I need to self-improve on as an educator. He allowed me to see a different side of what it takes to be an effective communicator in and outside of the classroom.  

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll of the week

After an attack on a Saudi oil facility last Saturday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo swiftly pointed the finger at Iran, and on Sunday Trump tweeted that the U.S. was “locked and loaded.” Although administration officials denied that Trump’s tweet referred to an impending U.S. military strike against Iran, the rhetoric from the White House has nevertheless made the possibility of an armed conflict between the U.S. and Iran — which about half of Americans expect “within the next few years,” according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in May — seem more likely than before.

And a SurveyMonkey poll conducted earlier this week found that only 13 percent of Americans support a U.S. military response to the attack on Saudi oil facilities. The poll, which didn’t mention Iran specifically, also found that about half of Americans felt the U.S. should either remove itself entirely from the situation or limit its response to condemning the attack and possibly sanctioning the perpetrators.

But while the SurveyMonkey poll suggests there’s little public appetite for U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia’s response to the attack, a survey conducted in June found that the use of military force in Iran may be one military intervention that the U.S. public could get behind, especially if Americans perceive Iran’s nuclear capabilities as a threat. In that survey, which was released earlier this month by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 70 percent of respondents, including 82 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of Democrats, supported using U.S. troops to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. And as you can see in the chart below, there’s a lot more support for sending troops to Iran than to other parts of the world, including Iraq, Syria and China.

I spoke with Dina Smeltz, the lead author of the survey and a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, about why Amercians seem more willing to commit U.S. troops to stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons than to other causes. “If Americans perceive a threat to our own country or to an ally, they are willing to support the use of force,” Smeltz said. “But if they see it as an internal matter abroad [or] not a direct threat to the United States, they are more reluctant.”

And it’s entirely possible that Americans perceive the attack on Saudi oil facilities as an issue that doesn’t directly endanger the U.S., but believe that Iran’s nuclear capabilities are a threat. Iran has denied that it was behind the attack, but that’s not the only recent sign of aggression. Iran has been taking steps to upgrade its nuclear infrastructure, publicly violating the 2015 nuclear deal that the U.S. helped negotiate and then abandoned in 2018, and Americans may perceive Iran’s pursuit of nuclear capabilities as a threat. Additionally, Smeltz told me that if the Trump administration portrays the Saudi attack as a direct threat to the United States, it could help shore up support for a military approach.

But while the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs poll might seem to indicate that an overwhelming majority of Americans are ready to go to war over Iran’s nuclear capabilities, it did find that support dropped when specific types of military interventions were proposed: In response to a question that asked respondents what strategies they’d favor if Iran withdrew from the nuclear deal altogether, 51 percent said they’d support conducting cyberattacks against Iran’s computer systems, 48 percent said they’d support airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, and 40 percent said they’d support sending troops to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities — all significantly lower than the 70 percent that said they supported sending U.S. troops to Iran to stop them from obtaining nuclear weapons.

And there’s another reason to think that this poll may have overstated overall support for military intervention in Iran: The Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs asked about Iran in the context of other military conflicts, whereas a July poll from Fox News asked about military intervention only in Iran. The Fox News poll found that far fewer Americans — 53 percent — favored military action to stop the development of nuclear weapons. When asked about the discrepancy, Smeltz said the true answer is “probably something in between the two.” She added, however, that regardless of whether the real number is closer to 40, 50 or 70 percent, messaging from the White House or the media characterizing Iran as a threat could drive up support for military intervention, especially if “a big chunk of the population is already willing to support the use of force.”

At this stage at least, Americans still prefer a non-military approach to Iran: According to the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs poll, 81 percent of Americans said they either “somewhat” or “strongly” support continuing diplomatic efforts to get Iran to stop enriching uranium if the country withdraws from the nuclear deal, and 78 percent said they somewhat or strongly support tighter economic sanctions. A Gallup poll conducted in July also found that a majority of Americans preferred that the U.S. rely on economic and diplomatic efforts rather than military action — although 42 percent told Gallup that the U.S. should take military action if diplomatic and economic measures fail.

For now, the administration seems to have decided against immediate military action, and on Wednesday, Trump announced tighter economic sanctions on Iran in response to the attack. But Trump has not entirely ruled out using military force, and if he were to exercise a military option against Iran, the polling we have so far seems to indicate that it may not be very popular — but that could change if the administration can convince the public that Iran’s actions are a threat to the United States.

Other polling bites:

57 percent of Americans view segregation in schools as a “very” or “moderately serious” problem, according to a Gallup poll released this week. Of the four policy proposals Gallup offered as methods of reducing school segregation, the most popular option was establishing more regional magnet schools (79 percent of respondents said they were in favor). The least popular option, with 43 percent in favor, was requiring districts to bus students to neighboring schools to increase schools’ racial diversity, a policy that became a flash point in the first Democratic debate between Sen. Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden.

YouGov and FairVote teamed up to simulate the Democratic primary under a ranked-choice voting system. The system asked voters to rank the candidates by preference (with the ability to rank 10 of 20 candidates or just the five candidates with the highest polling averages). The candidate with the fewest votes was then eliminated and his or her votes redistributed to each voter’s next choice. This process is repeated until one winner remained. In the first-round tally of the five-candidate version of this poll, former Vice President Joe Biden led Sen. Elizabeth Warren 33 percent to 29 percent, but after eliminating and redistributing according to ranked choice, Warren led Biden 53 percent to 47 percent. Unfortunately for the Warren campaign, that’s not how the Democratic primary works.

Following the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in August, the National Rifle Association’s popularity has taken a hit: Less than 50 percent of Americans say they have a favorable opinion of the organization, according to a Gallup poll. This is only the second time in the last 30 years that the NRA has been this unpopular. However, much of its current unpopularity is due to Democrats and independents turning against the organization, not a shift among Republicans, who largely hold positive views of the organization (87 percent had a favorable opinion).

In the week following the third Democratic debate, Warren seems to be continuing her steady rise in the polls, though Biden maintains the lead. A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Tuesday showed Warren increased support from 19 percent in July to 25 percent. That’s in line with other initial post-debate polls as well, including the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll and Morning Consult poll, which both found modest gains for Warren since the debate.

Afghanistan’s national elections will take place on Sept. 28, five months after their original April date. According to a July 2018 Gallup poll, only 19 percent of Afghans are confident in the honesty of their elections, the lowest among the countries that Gallup polled in South Asia. In that same poll, 91 percent of respondents said corruption is widespread in the Afghan government.

According to a Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll, roughly 7 in 10 teenagers said the effects of climate change will cause “a moderate or great deal of harm” to people in their generation, which is slightly higher than the percentage of those 30 or older who said the same. What’s more, 24 percent of teenagers have engaged in climate change activism, either attending a climate change rally, contacting a public official or participating in a school walkout to raise climate change awareness, which The Washington Post described as “a remarkable level of activism for a group that has not yet reached voting age.”

The long-anticipated storming of Area 51 — a Facebook event in which 2.1 million users indicated they planned to raid a highly classified military base looking for aliens — is today. A Gallup poll from earlier this month reveals that a third of U.S. adults believe that prior UFO sightings have actually been alien spaceships. Another 16 percent say they have seen something they thought was a UFO. To boot, 68 percent of Americans believe the government is withholding information about UFOs — so I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the raid finds.

Trump approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 42.1 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 53.7 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -11.6 points). At this time last week, 41.6 percent approved and 53.7 percent disapproved (for a net approval rating of -12.1 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 42.2 percent and a disapproval rating of 53.7 percent, for a net approval rating of -11.5 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot, Democrats currently lead by 6.8 percentage points (46.8 percent to 40.0 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 6.6 points (46.4 percent to 39.8 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 6.3 points (46.2 percent to 39.9 percent).

Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2020 elections.

[ciabrainbugs]

Immigration facts and figures

This is a growing list of well-sourced articles and studies on how immigration impacts societies. I apologize for any nonworking or outdated links as this post includes information I’ve been gathering over a long time and encompasses a wide range of topics. This information is important. Most of the text is quoted directly from the sources and items in italics are written by me for added context and clarity.

-Some notes- First, like to address off the top that a lot of this information seems to reduce people to numbers, and statistics. This post is in response to rhetoric from disingenuous people who argue in bad faith. It’s an attempt to dismiss myths and demystify the situation. It is not my attempt to justify boiling people down to their value to a capitalist system. Rather it’s a way to dispell the arguments of those that try to do just that. Lastly, as of right now this does not include information regarding the current detention centers operating along the border. Rest assured I’m working on another post with a more granular look at the horrible conditions and specifics of it.  

_______________________________________________________________________

ECONOMIC EFFECTS

_______________________________________________________________________

The following links and articles demonstrate the net positive effects on the U.S. economy that undocumented immigrants provide in very real tangible terms. 

https://www.epi.org/publication/immigration-facts/

We should regularize the country’s 11.7 million unauthorized immigrants by providing them legal status and a path to citizenship; it would actually be good for the economy and generate jobs. Providing legal status and citizenship enables unauthorized immigrants to produce and earn significantly more than they do when they are working without legal rights or protections and in constant fear of deportation. Their resulting productivity and wage gains ripple through the economy because immigrants are not just workers—they are also consumers and taxpayers. In particular, they will spend their increased earnings on items like food, clothing, housing, cars, and computers. That spending, in turn, will stimulate demand for more goods and services, which will create the need for more workers. In other words, it will create jobs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/illegal-immigrants-are-bolstering-social-security-with-billions.html

While it has been evident for years that illegal immigrants pay a variety of taxes, the extent of their contributions to Social Security is striking: the money added up to about 10 percent of last year's surplus

-Cost to Healthcare

Commonly, pundits will claim that immigrants are a drain to our healthcare system. This is blatantly incorrect.

https://khn.org/news/immigrants-medicare-health-costs/

“The study found that in 2009, immigrants contributed $33 billion to the trust fund [Medicare Part A], nearly 15 percent of total contributions. They received $19 billion of expenditures, about 8 percent, giving the trust fund a surplus of $14 billion. People born in the United States, on the other hand, contributed $192 billion and received $223 billion, decreasing the trust fund by $31 billion...”

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2012.1223

“Immigrants, particularly noncitizens, heavily subsidize Medicare,” 

“Policies that reduce immigration would almost certainly weaken Medicare’s financial health, while an increasing flow of immigrants might bolster its sustainability.”

-Undocumented Filing Taxes

Another misconception involves the incorrect thought that these people do not pay taxes. Again, this is patently false

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/nyregion/16immig.html?pagewanted=print

“Illegal immigrants do not have Social Security numbers, but the Internal Revenue Service allows them to file taxes by assigning applicants individual taxpayer identification numbers. The numbers were introduced in 1996 to encourage noncitizens with United States income, including foreign investors, to file returns. It is generally accepted that most of the 11 million numbers issued since then have gone to illegal immigrants.”

https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-state-local-tax-contributions-1/#.V-Q4CWWj-lL

“Undocumented immigrants contribute significantly to state and local taxes, collectively paying an estimated $11.64 billion a year. Contributions range from almost $2.2 million in Montana with an estimated undocumented population of 4,000 to more than $3.1 billion in California, home to more than 3 million undocumented immigrants.” “Granting legal status to all undocumented immigrants in the United States as part of a comprehensive immigration reform and allowing them to work legally would increase their state and local tax contributions by an estimated $2.1 billion a year. Their nationwide effective state and local tax rate would increase to 8.6 percent.“

______________________________________________________________________

CRIME STATS

______________________________________________________________________

Even the Koch Brothers’ CATO institute can’t obfuscate the facts. Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are less likely to commit crimes than their native-born counterparts. https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/their-numbers-demographics-countries-originT

he data show that all immigrants—legal and illegal—are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans relative to their shares of the population. By themselves, illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. An estimated 1,955,951 native-born Americans, 117,994 illegal immigrants, and 43,618 legal immigrants were incarcerated in 2016. The incarceration rate for native-born Americans was 1,521 per 100,000, 800 per 100,000 for illegal immigrants, and 325 per 100,000 for legal immigrants in 2016 (Figure 1).

https://www.cato.org/blog/murder-mollie-tibbetts-illegal-immigrant-crime-facts

“To calculate those conviction rates, I used an estimate of the size of the illegal immigrant population in Texas as well as data from the American Community Survey. For the number of native-born Americans and legal immigrants. The conviction rates are per each subpopulation of native-born Americans, illegal immigrants, and legal immigrants. Immigration status makes no difference in the reporting of serious crimes like murder or robbery, so these statistics aren’t likely to be biased.”

-Illegal immigrants are 47 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives.

Oxford

http://oxfordre.com/criminology/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264079-e-93

“Research consistently shows that foreign-born individuals are less likely to commit crime than naturalized citizens in the United States and that immigration status may abate crime within a community.”

-Crime is going down despite rising migrant population

“Arrest, sentencing, and incarceration rates have been changing in the late the 20th and early 21st centuries. Since reaching an all-time high in both violent and property crime in the mid-1990s, the number and rate of violent and property crime in the United States have been steadily declining (Federal Bureau of Investigation,

2015a

) The states with the highest violent and property crime rates neither are the most populous nor house the largest number of immigrants.

Places with the largest increases in population have been associated with the largest decreases in crime rates in the past decade.”

-NPR

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/02/607652253/studies-say-illegal-immigration-does-not-increase-violent-crime

All of this comes as no surprise to Art Acevedo, the police chief in Houston, which has one of largest undocumented populations in the nation. The chief has been publicly critical of the immigration crackdown. "There's no wave of crime being committed by the immigrant community," Acevedo said.

-Drugs

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4450776-Light-Et-Al-AJPH-Published.html

They found that the dramatic influx of undocumented immigrants, similarly, did not drive up rates of drug and alcohol arrests or the number of drug overdoses and DUI deaths. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t also address that the U.S. incarceration rates, something inherently attached to this subject.

“The incarceration rate in the United States is the highest in the world: it is presently 693 inmates per 100,000 people in the population”

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2016.html The American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 109 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html ______________________________________________________________________

Effects of Deportation in Alabama (HB56)

______________________________________________________________________

The following is an account of what happened when a community actively set out to perform mass deportations. It clearly shows a negative impact on the economy and industries in the state.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/undocumented-workers-immigration-alabama

“When HB 56 passed, Albertville—where the booming poultry industry had attracted thousands of immigrants from Mexico and Central America—quickly became the national face of the crackdown. From 2000 to 2010, the number of unauthorized immigrants in Alabama jumped from an estimated 25,000 to 120,000, as migrants flocked to jobs in agriculture, meatpacking, and construction. “

“That concern drove Alabama to pass the nation’s toughest legislation but it is not alone in its desire to stem the flow of undocumented workers. At courthouses, simple tasks like renewing one’s vehicle tags now required proof of legal status, which generated long lines for citizens and non-citizens alike. Utilities were unsure whether they needed to cut off service to residents who couldn’t prove citizenship.” The act of attempting such a sweeping measure created a quagmire of bureaucracy and broke down a system unequipped to handle it. The effects of which resulted in an undeniable, measurable economic downturn. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/alabama-tried-a-donald-trump-style-immigration-law-it-failed-in-a-big-way/2015/08/22/2ae239a6-48f2-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html?utm_term=.aedce2d6f707 “Business groups blamed the tough measures for scaring away capital and for an exodus of workers that hurt the state’s agriculture industry. Large farms spent millions training new workers. The Byrds conceded that the agriculture sector suffered after some immigrants fled the state. “Most of them left and didn’t come back,” said Terry Darring-Rogers, who works at a Mobile law firm specializing in immigration.”

https://cber.cba.ua.edu/New%20AL%20Immigration%20Law%20-%20Costs%20and%20Benefits.pdf 

“This report presents an initial cost-benefit analysis of HB56, the new Alabama immigration law and finds that the law is rather costly to the state. Economies are demand-driven so any policy, regulation, law, or action that reduces demand will not contribute to economic development no matter how well-intentioned. “ A study by Dr. Samuel Addy of the University of Alabama estimated that HB56 could shrink the state's annual GDP by $11 billion or almost 6%, a result of lost sales and income taxes and fall in demand from lost consumers.

A similar situation was recorded in california in 2015. Unfortunately, there is less information on this incident.

https://www.independent.com/news/2017/jun/22/labor-shortage-leaves-13-million-crops-rot-fields/

“[in California] An estimated $13 million of strawberries, broccoli, leafy greens, and other unharvested produce were plowed under last year [2015], up from five years ago..,”

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Cost of Deportation Study (285 billion)

The following section is in regards to the enormous cost that mass deportation would entail.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/2010/03/19/7470/the-costs-of-mass-deportation/

“$285 billion total cost to deport the undocumented immigrant population and continue border interdiction and interior enforcement efforts over a five-year period (in 2008 dollars).” There is little to no evidence that any of the money we currently pour into these programs and institutions are doing anything to combat the perceived issue. “While the federal government was doubling down on enforcement efforts over a five-year period, it wasn’t even able to halt growth in the size of the undocumented immigrant population. In other words, the current ICE and CBP budgets (plus a massive recession) were almost sufficient to prevent a net increase in undocumented immigrants but insufficient to diminish it. (pg. 16 figure 6)”

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Wall

This is an absurd solution to a problem that doesn’t exist in the first place. At best it’s expensive and ineffective, at worst it will lead to loss of human life and exacerbate environmental problems for the region.

cost of the wall (21.6 - 70 Billion)

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-wall-exclusive-idUSKBN15O2ZN

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/us/politics/senate-democrats-border-wall-cost-trump.html

Walls Don’t Work

Simply put the majority of illegal immigrants will not be deterred by a wall, and in fact, it could lead to an increase. Because--

They Come by Air

https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/sep/08/jorge-ramos/ramos-40-undocumented-immigrants-come-air/

They overstay their visas

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2006/05/22/modes-of-entry-for-the-unauthorized-migrant-population/

It Prevents them from Going back to Mexico

https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/18/donald-trump-immigration-border/

“estimates indicate that 86 percent of undocumented entries were offset by departures, and the undocumented population grew slowly, rising to just under 3 million over two decades. “

Most do not intend to stay here but increasing the difficulty in crossing the border makes them more likely to not attempt a return.

Building a wall increases the cost of detaining immigrants by forcing agents into more remote areas and the increase in deaths along the border

“Enforcement was further buttressed by the launching of Operation Blockade in El Paso, Texas, in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, California, in 1994. These operations, led by the U.S. Border Patrol, erected a literal wall of enforcement resources at the two busiest U.S.-Mexico border crossings. They also diverted migratory flows away from these regions, through the Sonoran Desert, and into Arizona. This diversion greatly increased the costs and risks of undocumented border crossing: Since 1986, more than 7,000 migrants have died along the border, and the average cost of crossing has risen from $600 to $4,500, according to estimates from the Mexican Migration Project, which I co-direct.”

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The Legal Battle

Our immigration courts are ill-equipped to handle the numbers. We should be investing in more public defenders and judges to process more people. The system is broken as it exists is broken.

https://www.justice.gov/eoir/office-of-the-chief-immigration-judge

The Office of the Chief Immigration Judge (OCIJ) is led by the chief immigration judge, who establishes operating policies and oversees policy implementation for the immigration courts. OCIJ provides overall program direction and establishes priorities for approximately 400 immigration judges located in 62 immigration courts throughout the Nation.

This means that there are over 1 million back logged cases

http://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.181106.html http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/536/

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MULTI SOURCES AND NON TEXT SOURCES Science Vs Podcast https://www.gimletmedia.com/science-vs/immigration Adam Ruins Everything https://www.trutv.com/shows/adam-ruins-everything/blog/adams-sources/adam-ruins-immigration.html WNYC Podcast https://www.wnyc.org/story/bnch-migration-doug-massey/ Ammon Bundy Denouncing Rhetoric https://www.newsweek.com/right-wing-militia-leader-blasts-trump-migrant-rhetoric-1235095

IF YOU MADE IT TO THE BOTTOM THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING MY FIRST POST ON TUMBLR. I’M NOT SURE IF THIS KIND OF POST IS RIGHT FOR THIS SITE, BUT I NEED A PLACE TO COLLECT THESE THINGS AND IT SEEMED LIKE THE BEST WAY TO ORGANIZE WHAT I WANTED.

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Thursday, February 25, 2021

COVID-19 cases falling (nearly) everywhere (Foreign Policy) New COVID-19 cases and deaths have dropped worldwide for the sixth consecutive week, according to figures compiled by the World Health Organization. The WHO recorded 2.4 million new cases last week, a drop of 11 percent compared to the previous week. The 66,000 deaths last week represented a 20 percent decline. Five out of the six WHO regions now show a consistent downward trend in new cases, although the trendline in the Eastern Mediterranean region remains flat due to continued case increases in Iran and Iraq.

Not to be sniffed at: Agony of post-COVID-19 loss of smell (AP) The doctor slid a miniature camera into the patient’s right nostril, making her whole nose glow red with its bright miniature light. “Tickles a bit, eh?” he asked as he rummaged around her nasal passages, the discomfort causing tears to well in her eyes and roll down her cheeks. The patient, Gabriella Forgione, wasn’t complaining. The 25-year-old pharmacy worker was happy to be prodded and poked at the hospital in Nice, in southern France, to advance her increasingly pressing quest to recover her sense of smell. Along with her sense of taste, it suddenly vanished when she fell ill with COVID-19 in November, and neither has returned. Being deprived of the pleasures of food and the scents of things that she loves are proving tough on her body and mind. Shorn of odors both good and bad, Forgione is losing weight and self-confidence. “Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Do I stink?’” she confessed. “Normally, I wear perfume and like for things to smell nice. Not being able to smell bothers me greatly.” A year into the coronavirus pandemic, doctors and researchers are still striving to better understand and treat the accompanying epidemic of COVID-19-related anosmia—loss of smell—draining much of the joy of life from an increasing number of sensorially frustrated longer-term sufferers like Forgione.

Biden to order sweeping review of U.S. supply chain weak spots (Washington Post) President Biden on Wednesday will formally order a 100-day government review of potential vulnerabilities in U.S. supply chains for critical items, including computer chips, medical gear, electric-vehicle batteries and specialized minerals. The directive comes as U.S. automakers are grappling with a severe shortage of semiconductors, essential ingredients in the high-tech entertainment and navigation systems that fill modern passenger vehicles. Biden’s executive order, which he is scheduled to sign this afternoon, also is aimed at avoiding a repeat of the shortages of personal protective gear such as masks and gloves experienced last year during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. The president’s order, which had been anticipated, represents the partial fulfillment of a campaign pledge. But mandating a government study will be the easy part. Extensively modifying U.S. supply lines and reducing the country’s dependence upon foreign suppliers—after decades of globalization—could prove difficult and costly.

U.S. seeks to return to U.N. human rights body (Reuters) The United States will seek election to the U.N. Human Rights Council later this year, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday, marking the Biden administration’s latest international re-engagement. Blinken, addressing the council by recorded video, said that President Joseph Biden’s administration would work to eliminate what he called the Geneva forum’s “disproportionate focus” on U.S. ally Israel. The council, set up in 2006, has a stand-alone item on the Palestinian territories on its agenda every session, the only issue with such treatment, which both Democratic and Republican administrations have opposed.

Freedom of speech the real issue in Spain (Washington Post) Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in some of Spain’s largest cities every night for a week, often clashing with police. In Barcelona on Saturday, authorities said they detained 38 people and recorded injuries among 13. The anger of the young protesters is centered on the arrest of a man who until recently was an obscure figure: Pablo Rivadulla, a rapper better known by his stage name, Pablo Hasél. But the demonstrations are about far more than one man’s arrest, speaking to growing concern inside and out of Spain about the effect of the country’s anti-terrorism laws and lèse-majesté statutes circumscribing the freedom of expression.

Covid inspires 1,200 new German words (The Guardian) From coronamüde (tired of Covid-19) to Coronafrisur (corona hairstyle), a German project is documenting the huge number of new words coined in the last year as the language races to keep up with lives radically changed by the pandemic. The list, compiled by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, an organisation that documents German language in the past and present, already comprises more than 1,200 new German words—many more than the 200 seen in an average year. It includes feelings many can relate to, such as overzoomed (stressed by too many video calls), Coronaangst (when you have anxiety about the virus) and Impfneid (envy of those who have been vaccinated). Other new words reveal the often strange reality of life under restrictions: Kuschelkontakt (cuddle contact) for the specific person you meet for cuddles and Abstandsbier (distance beer) for when you drink with friends at a safe distance. The words also capture specific moments during the pandemic. For example, Balkonsänger (balcony singer) is someone who sings to people from their balcony, which was popular during the spring lockdown. Hamsteritis, referring to the urge to stockpile food, was also commonly used at the start of the crisis.

China uses patriotism test to sweep aside last outlet for Hong Kong democracy (Washington Post) Serving as a district councilor in Hong Kong means addressing everyday concerns such as pest control, traffic issues and helping elderly residents pay bills. One of the few perks of the modest office is having a say, alongside tycoons and Beijing loyalists, in choosing Hong Kong’s leader. On Tuesday, Hong Kong’s government announced that anyone running for these local positions will need to be a “patriot”—meaning they must swear loyalty not to their constituents but to Beijing and the Communist Party—as China moves to quash the territory’s last avenue of democracy. The changes, which are expected to be introduced to the legislature—where there is no viable opposition—next month and become law soon thereafter, will trigger the expulsion of several young pro-democracy councilors, even if they read the oath as instructed. Disqualified candidates will be barred from running in any elections for five years. With Tuesday’s announcement, the councils, the only fully democratic body in Hong Kong, fall in line with China’s broader reshaping of a city once known for its boisterous political culture as democratically chosen representatives are replaced with Beijing loyalists.

The Mekong River (Nikkei Asia) There are 60 million people who live along the lower Mekong River, and they were in for a rough surprise in early January when China drastically cut the discharge from the Jinghong Dam in Yunnan Province. The “tests”—which were slated to end January 24—entailed cutting the flow of the river from 1,900 cubic meters per second to just 1,000 cubic meters per second, but the final day of tests came and went and the volume is still down. That this occurred in the middle of the dry season was particularly rough for Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, countries that depend on the river. China has begun to draw international ire over their management of the river, which it has built 11 large dams on.

A Digital Firewall in Myanmar (NYT) The Myanmar soldiers descended before dawn on Feb. 1, bearing rifles and wire cutters. At gunpoint, they ordered technicians at telecom operators to switch off the internet. For good measure, the soldiers snipped wires without knowing what they were severing, according to an eyewitness and a person briefed on the events. The data center raids in Yangon and other cities in Myanmar were part of a coordinated strike in which the military seized power, locked up the country’s elected leaders and took most of its internet users offline. Since the coup, the military has repeatedly shut off the internet and cut access to major social media sites, isolating a country that had only in the past few years linked to the outside world. The military regime has also floated legislation that could criminalize the mildest opinions expressed online. So far, the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, has depended on cruder forms of control to restrict the flow of information. But the army seems serious about setting up a digital fence to more aggressively filter what people see and do online. Such a comprehensive firewall may also exact a heavy price: The internet outages since the coup have paralyzed a struggling economy. Longer disruptions will damage local business interests and foreign investor confidence as well as the military’s own vast business interests.

Iraq’s struggling Christians hope for boost from pope visit (AP) Nasser Banyameen speaks about his hometown of Qaraqosh in the historical heartland of Iraqi Christianity with nostalgia. Before Islamic State group fighters swept through the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq. Before the militants shattered his sense of peace. Before panicked relatives and neighbors fled, some never to return. Iraq’s Christian communities in the area were dealt a severe blow when they were scattered by the IS onslaught in 2014, further shrinking the country’s already dwindling Christian population. Many hope their struggle to endure will get a boost from a historic visit by Pope Francis planned in March. Among the places on his itinerary is Qaraqosh, where this week Vatican and Iraqi flags fluttered from light poles, some adorned with the pope’s image. Francis’ visit, his first foreign trip since the coronavirus pandemic and the first ever by a pope to Iraq, is a sign that “You’re not alone,” said Monsignor Segundo Tejado Muñoz, the undersecretary of the Vatican’s development office. “There’s someone who is thinking of you, who is with you. And these signs are so important. So important.”

Syria’s economic woes (NYT) In a private meeting with pro-government journalists, President Bashar al-Assad was asked about Syria’s economic meltdown: the currency collapse that has gutted salaries, the skyrocketing prices for basic goods and the chronic shortages of fuel and bread. “I know,” he said, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion. “I know.” But he offered no concrete steps to stem the crisis beyond floating this idea: Television channels should cancel cooking shows so as not to taunt Syrians with images of unattainable food. As the 10-year anniversary of Syria’s civil war looms, Mr. al-Assad’s most immediate threats are not the rebel factions and foreign powers that still control large swaths of the country. Instead, it is the crushing economic crisis that has hobbled the reconstruction of destroyed cities, impoverished the population and left a growing number of Syrians struggling to get enough food. Food prices have more than doubled in the last year. The World Food Program warned this month that 60 percent of Syrians, or 12.4 million people, were at risk of going hungry, the highest number ever recorded.

The Deadliest Middle East Construction Project Since The Pyramids (The Guardian) On December 2, 2010, FIFA announced that Qatar would host the 2022 World Cup —- a first for a Middle East nation. Over the next ten years, thousands of migrant laborers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka came to Qatar to work on the elaborate preparations for the world’s biggest football tournament. Sadly, during that period at least 6,500 of those workers died, according to an analysis by the Guardian. The findings were compiled from government sources, and mean that an average of 12 migrant workers from the five South Asian nations have died each week since the announcement was made. The total death toll is significantly higher because the figures don’t include deaths from other countries like the Philippines and Kenya that send large numbers of workers to Qatar. Also not included are deaths occurring in the final months of 2020. More deaths have undoubtedly occurred since preparations for the 2022 tournament continue.

The value of housework (Foreign Policy) In a landmark ruling, a Beijing divorce court has ordered a man to pay his wife for five years of unpaid housework during their marriage. The award does not amount to much, roughly $1,100 dollars per year, but marks a new era in Chinese divorce law after the government introduced a new civil code. Under the new code, an aggrieved spouse is entitled to seek compensation if they shouldered more domestic responsibilities—with no prenuptial agreement necessary. The case follows a similar one in Argentina in 2019, when a divorce court ordered a husband to pay his wife of 27 years $179,000 in recognition of her unpaid domestic work. According to Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) figures, Chinese women spend roughly four hours per day on unpaid work—with their U.S. counterparts clocking in nearly the same amount. American men are closer to closing the gap than Chinese men, however. American men spending about 2.5 hours per day on unpaid labor, while Chinese men spend just 1.6 hours.