metasean

Almost 200 years ago that discerning observer of social life, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote about the exceptional ability of Americans to form voluntary associations and, more generally, to cooperate in solving problems that required concerted collective action. This capacity for cooperation apparently lasted into the post-World War II era, but several indicators suggest that during the last 3-4 decades it has been unraveling.

In these articles I argue that general well-being (and high levels of social cooperation) tends to move in the opposite direction from inequality. During the ‘disintegrative phases’ inequality is high while well-being and cooperation are low. During the ‘integrative phases’ inequality is low, while well-being and cooperation are high.

With economic inequality only getting worse [0, 1, 2] I can't help but wonder if there is also a decline in open source contributions? Or do our contributions increase because it provides visibility, and therefore increased economic opportunity, for those lower on the income scale?

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-inequality-w...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh...

[2] https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/890610260251033602

There's a day every decade where the U.S. Census does their best to get an accurate count of every human in the U.S. [0]

Combine that with the data from the correspondinc Apr 15th, and we should have something pretty close to a "poverty election day".

[0]: cell phone and spotty network made it too hard to look up a good source - please feel free to add them if you can)

I had a professor who was adamant that we think of all design as "Constraint-based design". I've definitely found it a useful approach - but I still benefit from the reminder to use it in personal projects.

This is similiar to goals of http://codekata.com/ except, this focuses on design, while Code Katas are more focused on algorithms.

I find these tools to be really useful in evaluating designs and emphasizing to stakeholders where designs fall according to standards:

- http://www.checkmycolours.com/

- https://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html#fg=33...

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edit: adding extra lines to get proper line breaks

I grew up with a sociologist as a mother, which means I grew up being taught a lot these systemic bias indicators. Having tried to explain the systemic nature of racism was certainly much more of a challenge before social media!

I'd also highly recommend everyone take an Implicit Bias test or two - https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html Your results might surprise you.

In the first 14 years of Norway's Highest Security Department (SHS), their version of solitary confinement, they only had to put 11 prisoners there! [0]

The Wikipedia descriptions of Anders Breivik's confinement describe SHS [1]

According to a recent Business Insider video [2]:

- "With few exceptions, judges can only sentence criminals to a maximum of 21 years" which is less then these three men did in solitary!

- "In Norway, only 20% of prisoners return to jail. Compared to the US where 76.6% of prisoners are re-arrested within five years."

Which is even more impressive when you learn that as of August of 2014 Norway's incarceration rate was 75 per 100,000 people, in contrast to 707 per 100,000 in the U.S. [3]

So we Americans incarcerate almost 10 times as many people as Norway with a recidivism rate more than 3.8 times as high as Norway - clearly our focus on "reasonable cost" is justifiable!</sarcasm>

[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik#Prison_...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-norways-luxurious-maxi...

[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-...

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Please provide some links to these projects.

There's a start-up called Daplie building such a system of hardware and apps. It's open source and the founder has a focus on user-owned data and data security.

(I know several teammembers and preordered via Indigogo, but am otherwise unaffiliated.)

Normal sterilization procedures such as boiling or irradiating materials fail to render prions non-infective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep... (The quoted sentence is from the paragraph immediately above the TOC block.)

Remember it was the hospital that sent me, and anybody else who had surgery during the same period, a letter saying I may have exposed. While they followed required sterilization procedures, those standards were apparently not enough to statistically ensure prions were destroyed. I'm not sure if they knew what was required in this regard, because one of the things mentioned in the letter was that all related surgical equipment had subsequently been destroyed.

According the always correct source of ultimate wisdom</s> - wikipedia, there isn't currently a way to test for it while alive, but there are some promising areas of research.

At present, there is virtually no way to detect PrPSc reliably except by examining the brain using neuropathological and immunohistochemical methods after death. Accumulation of the abnormally folded PrPSc form of the PrP protein is a characteristic of the disease, but it is present at very low levels in easily accessible body fluids like blood or urine. Researchers have tried to develop methods to measure PrPSc, but there are still no fully accepted methods for use in materials such as blood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...

re: Discussions of death

I completely agree that it should be talked about more and plans made. Unfortunately several family members don't see things the same way and this provided the impetus for discussion.

You should stop thinking that way. A decade past the initial scare, you're likely no more at risk than anyone else.

I'm not an expert, but the last time I researched it, I wouldn't even develop symptoms for at least a decade. So I'm actually at the point where I could actually find out that I have it.

You weren't given the disease, you were exposed to a small possibility of it.

I absolutely agree! That said, my probability is still drastically higher than the _average American_. I was dating a science teacher at the time and she did some research into it. Basically the only other Americans with similar odds are military personnel stationed in Europe during the Mad Cow scare. There are other populations, e.g. Europeans during the Mad Cow scare, that are at similar or higher probabilities. But among Americans my odds are definitely higher than average.

but as far as your day-to-day life goes you should consider yourself squarely in the "average" category.

I'm anything but average ;-) but I definitely don't let this impact my day-to-day life. It's much more of an intellectual curiosity and medical awareness for my family and doctors in case I should become symptomatic.

Thank you!

I definitely went through a range of emotions from confusion to anger that more wasn't done to minimize the likelihood of incidents like this.

As I learned more, I realized how improbable this situation was in the first place. My current understanding is that while our* probability is higher than the average American, we're still highly unlikely to develop CJD. More importantly to me is that there isn't anything I can do about it, so I try not to let it consume a lot of my mental energy.

*I think there was a two week window, so anyone operated on at that hospital during that window is in the same situation.

The last I heard the test can only be done during autopsy. (Because they're analyzing slices of brain tissue.)

I first heard about prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after getting a letter saying I may have been exposed.

I had surgery after someone with CJD, but before that person died, was autopsied, and diagnosed.

That was over a decade ago. So far no signs of it. I did make peace with the fact that I have a much higher probability of dying from it than the average American. The only substantivu changes in my life are:

(a) My family and I have had very frank discussion about death earlier than we would have otherwise.

(b) I no longer donate blood.

(c) I removed myself as an organ donor. Although my family knows I still want my body to be available for science.

The article mentions the first two people asked to leave were a couple flying together.

Pretending disability

And what happens to those that are 'genuinely handicap' and have medical costs that unavoidably exceed the 'lower amount'?

What happens to the weapon when the maker/owner passes away?

I can't speak specifically to ADA, but I know federally funded programs were required to meet 508 standards as of 2003, which included captions or transcripts for videos.

So expecting such affordances for ADA purposes in 2007 seems reasonable.

The mobile experience of reading this article is horrific. I did enjoy the little bit I was able to read before the lilliputian font drove me away, but drive me away it did!

But I doubt he actually read it. It's more likely that he listened to the audio version.

from August 2016

If I stop the video, then use the "resume video" in the lower-right corner, then I get the audio but it's out of sync by however long it took me to stop the video in the first place.

The first step of which should include asking questions about the law. Why does it exist? What prompted its creation in the first place? Does it meet its original goals? What does it inadvertantly do? How does it fail? etc.

I'm really not sure why I'm getting downvoted.

Neither curiousgirl or I said the prof should have been detained.

Neither curiousgirl or I said his detention was legal.

Neither curiousgirl or I said we shouldn't fight the current climate.

Neither curiousgirl or I YELLED AT SOMEBODY ON THE INTERWEBS.

I pointed out that someone had a reasonable question, and asked it in a reasonable and respectful way, in a forum that supposedly is about discussion.

Y'all need to pick your battles. It shouldn't have been with either of us!!!

No need to be a Derp about it, curiousgal was asking a logical question.

Yes, the answer was in the article, but it was toward the end. Since many of these days skim articles or read HN comments first or some combination _and_ getting paid to do something for others is a common, if not defining aspect of "work" [0], her question is logical.

As for FUD spreading, before she even asked the question, she started by stating, "IANAL" which indicates anything said about the law should be taken with more than a bit of doubt.

So take a chill pill. Yes,it is important to answer the question to remove doubt or ambiguity, but there was no need to be rude or disrespectful or to berate her for asking a question!

[0] The societal definition of "work", not the physical sciences definition.

edit for spelling and formatting

Comes up on a regular basis [0], but definitely worth the read if you haven't already done so.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=They%20Write%20the%20Right%20S...

I mostly agree, but would like to share a counter-anecdote.

When I was growing up my parents would take 'weekend drives'. They would look at architecture, comment on things from tree species to historical events in the area. And they would listen to talk radio. Most of the time, I'd be fighting nausea in the back seat. For a very long time I had a very strong association between talk radio and actual nausea.

About a decade ago a friend introduced me to Car Talk on NPR. Car Talk isn't jornalism or news, but it was very entertaining. It became my 'gateway drug' to NPR. I added Wait, Wait, Donn't Tell Me to the my list (again, not journalism, but definitely newsy), and now NPR's morning line-up, including actual journalism) is a regular part of my workday routine.

So, sometimes the clickbaity, not really news pieces can gently introduce people to the real deal.

(apologies for any typos: phone response)

Asimov introduced the concept of "psychohistory" in his Foundations series [1]. Psychohistory "combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people" [1]

Almost a decade ago I heard about a researcher who took up the gauntlet of developing psychohistory. His name is Peter Turchin. Because there was an established academic field already named psychohistory [2], he named his field of study "Cliodynamics" [3].

When I first heard about Dr. Turchin, he had recently made a prediction that we were likely to see political violence in the 2020s [4, 5].

In this current blog entry he talks about factors that are likely to influence whether there is or is not political violence in the next few years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory [3]: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/ [4]: http://www.zdnet.com/article/cliodynamics-a-science-for-pred...! [5]: http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf

It still seems particularly relevant given events over the weekend.