Humanities & Cultures

There's a reason I'm networking instead of job searching.

[...]As I've written before, it's becoming more and more clear that schools must become beacons of resiliency in every community in the midst of a climate disaster. And that includes everyday climate disasters, too. It's why our schoolyards need cisterns for capturing stormwater and bioswales to remediate urban runoff and microforests to protect neighborhoods from extreme heat.

Although public schools are chronically underfunded, we do actually have money to make these changes now. The two school bond measures that voters approved in November — one for the state, one for LAUSD — will funnel billions into facility upgrades. This week, LAUSD announced funding for new climate adaptation projects, including updates to emergency procedures. Hopefully that means throwing away the outdated manual and writing a new one. Parents near burn areas aren't getting good answers about how schools are being cleaned and tested for reopening. I spoke with one parent at Paul Revere Middle School, which is about a half-mile from the Palisades Fire perimeter. Upon returning to a school they were assured was safe, students found ash in their lockers. I'm also getting questions about how soils, sand, and garden beds should be cleaned and tested in schoolyards and playgrounds. Providing this guidance immediately should have been a priority for school board members.

What does better preparedness look like? Diagnostic tests ready on day one. Universal healthcare (perhaps at state or local levels). Vaccine innovations and new drugs against the families of viruses that pose pandemic threats. In its final days, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services awarded $590 million to mRNA biotech company Moderna to fast-track bird flu vaccines.

The thing about outbreak response policies is that they look somewhat like prevention when executed well. Aside from vaccines, it looks like paid sick leave for everyone, especially people who work with wild animals, livestock, and labs surveilling disease outbreaks; government access to farms and protections for whistleblowers.

Factory farming drives disease outbreaks by intensely confining animals that have a greater tendency to become infected, combined with incentives for farmers to keep sick and vulnerable animals alive with drugs. Researchers have called this “the infectious disease trap” and it applies to pandemic pathogens, too, according to Carlson.

“The majority of biomass, the majority of animal biomass on this planet is not wildlife anymore — it's livestock,” Carlson said. While it is possible to reduce meat consumption, factory farming likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

To this end, labor unions are an underrecognized avenue for pandemic preparedness. After COVID-19 decimated meatpacking plants in 2020, unions negotiated protections with employers that continue today. By union protections, meat workers should have access to personal protective equipment like boots, sleeves, masks, and goggles as fears of bird flu plague farms, plants, and “live hangs,” according to Mark Lauritsen, international VP and director of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union’s Food Processing, Packing and Manufacturing division. (However, dairy workers have become infected by bird flu on farms where employers do not provide P.P.E., according to reporting by Amy Maxmen.)

Today, several major meatpacking companies offer up to 20 hours of paid sick leave — more than they did pre-COVID-19, thanks to union negotiations. Those negotiations provide 4 hours for every 400 hours worked in states without more required leave; the union “would like it to be more hours,” Lauritsen added.

When I was studying Spanish in middle school, it was odd to me that a language could just, you know, drop subjects via conjugation. But I find myself increasingly dropping them, as they're understood.

A lot of communication these days is looking more imperative without necessarily being so.

Descriptivism is fun!

Although Mondays at the Margaret Walker Alexander Library in Jackson, Miss., are usually reserved for story time, these students were in for a special treat: a music lesson and performance by the longtime librarian and cellist.

On this December day, the librarian sat atop a wooden chair with her hair tucked away and wrapped in black cloth. She held her large string instrument upright by her side, and a book of sheet music sat fixed upon a black, tripod stand.

As the children’s murmuring faded, Olugbala’s lesson began.

After obtaining her degree from USM, she started a full-time position in the school’s library and worked her way to a supervisory role. “I’ve gone from periodicals to circulation, which is mainly just checking out books,” she said.

About six years ago, she found her way to the Jackson-Hinds Library System. Every week, through story times, sewing classes or chess club, she pours into Jackson’s youth and hopes to spark their own love of music and literature. Libraries, she explained, are “an integral part of education and culture.”

“The library is a repository of the hopes, dreams and understandings of a people,” she added.

A global ban on chewing it was implemented through the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1964, leaving coca under such a restrictive drug control regime that researchers even today often find it impossible to source the understudied leaves.

Similar paternalistic calls would attempt to justify the later global drug war. But 75 years on from the UN’s first diktats on coca, the organization’s health authority is set to publish its “critical” health review of the evidence underpinning the Schedule I status of the mildly stimulating, medicinal plant—rich in calcium and iron—after requests from Bolivia and Colombia to end its international prohibition.

Indigenous advocates have been prominent in building momentum for those countries—coca is already legal in Bolivia; in Colombia, consumption is only permitted within Indigenous communities—to make that request. “This is a David and Goliath battle against colonialism,” David Curtidor, director of indigenous-owned coca beer company Coca Nasa, told the Times of London in September. “We’re saying enough is enough.”

But change may be on the horizon. The WHO review could potentially lead the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs to recommend a reduction in the classification of coca, from which both cocaine and Coca-Cola derive key ingredients, under drug control treaties—or even decriminalization.

Tourism numbers are sky-high in Japan. The country saw record numbers of travelers throughout 2024, and government officials are hoping to see the numbers double by 2030. But workers are in short supply. So, to adapt to the tourism boom, Japan is turning to everything from robot hotel receptionists to contactless restaurants.

These robots and screens aren’t meant to be a gimmick, or to show off the country’s tech niche. Rather, they’re a symptom of Japan’s unique economic situation. The country is facing a declining birth rate and an aging population, with the latest government figures showing that people 65 years or older account for nearly 30% of Japan’s population. To fill the consumption gap, the country is working to lure in tourists. And with fewer workers, the country is turning to more automated systems for backup.

“Japanese society, in the long term, is shrinking,” said Masamichi Ishikura, a deputy director at the Japan Tourism Agency. “So, we need to bring in more tourism to revitalize the local economies.”

To do so, the country is partnering with content creators on social media platforms like TikTok, with videos about experiences you can only get in Japan. And the push is working.

A new policy from the D66 liberal democrats proposes giving all children in the Dutch capital access to outdoor play areas to climb, play with water and fire, sword-fight with sticks, build with hammers, rope or knives, wrestle and fall. “Rufty-tufty playing means that children might get a bump or a cut,” according to the policy – but it’s an acceptable risk, they say.

“The inspiration, and it really is a huge problem, is that children are hardly moving,” said Rob Hofland, head of the local D66 and proud uncle of tree-climbing children. “All kinds of problems stem from just sitting behind a screen. We see increasing numbers of burnouts and we are learning ever more about how unhealthy it is that the Dutch – the sitting champions of Europe – are so sedentary. Things need to change, and it starts young.”

Although the number of overweight children is relatively stable in the Netherlands, at 17%, the figure rises to a 25% for 18- to 24-year-olds. There has been an “alarming” increase in childhood diabetes, according to the Diabetes Fonds, while motor skills have declined so much that many children can no longer catch a ball.

A survey last year from Jantje Beton, which campaigns for outdoor play space, suggested the number of Dutch children playing alone outside without adult supervision plummeted from 25% in 2022 to 13% last year. Almost half play more indoors, compared with a third before the Covid pandemic.

Colonialists did what colonialists do. They came, they claimed, they took what they wanted and they moved on. They left behind pieces of their sunken ships, and the new names they gave these old places — the same places Hawaiians had frequented for hundreds of years before Westerners arrived, places for which they had their own names, preserved in chants passed down through generations.

But the times are changing with a movement to restore the original names of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which since 2006 have been protected as part of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

It began from the ground up, according to Randy Kosaki, the monument’s deputy superintendent for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A handful of Native Hawaiian scientists started using the original Hawaiian names for these islands in their research papers, and it’s caught on.

Now, federal agencies like NOAA print maps with both Hawaiian and Western names. Pearl and Hermes Atoll is also labeled as Manawai, French Frigate Shoals as Lalo, Necker as Mokumanamana.

On NOAA’s most recent research expedition to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the mix of scientists from Hawaiʻi and the mainland almost exclusively used the Hawaiian names when discussing where they were diving and surveying the reefs. That wasn’t the case on trips even a few years earlier.

The nonprofit organization now overseeing global Little Free Libraries finds the nonbook knockoffs “fun and flattering,” communications director Margret Aldrich says in an email. (She also notes “Little Free Library” is a trademarked name, requiring permission if used for money or “in an organized way.”)

Some libraries stress fundamental needs: A recently established Little Free Failure of Capitalism in South Seattle provides feminine products, soap, chargers, even Narcan. A Columbia City Little Free Pantry established by personal chef Molly Harmon grew into a statewide network for neighbors supporting neighbors.

Others are about the little things: Yarn. Jigsaw puzzles and children’s toys. Keychains (one keychain library in Hillman City has a TikTok account delighting 8,000+ followers). A Little Free Nerd Library holds Rubik’s Cubes and comic books.

Regardless of where each library falls on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they stand on common ground. “There’s a line from [Khalil] Gibran: ‘Work is love made visible,’ ” Little Library Guy says in a phone call. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re showing that they love the community by doing something for them.”

This gets a bit into the linguistic weeds, and if you're familiar with Dutch or High German, the errors are somewhat comical, especially with SVO vs. SOV. But overall an interesting exploration and distraction.

[...]coyote time makes me think of teaching and learning. It makes me think of all the times we demand precision from students – both in terms of timing and performance. It makes me think of how it would feel for students to have grace windows and large error bars in acceptable performance. It makes me think of the many students who, when they try to run and jump, instead fall into a pit of spikes because they were just a little off.

Celeste is still a very challenging game, but by adding in coyote time (and many other forgiveness mechanics like it), the developers keep it from feeling frustrating and punishing. This is what I hope our courses strive for: stretching students and challenging them without arbitrarily punishing them for not being perfect.

This is a delicate balance to achieve. In moments of tension between challenge and forgiveness, I tend to prefer forgiveness. After all, tolerance for error is one of the key tenets of Universal Design. However, I think games can teach us a lot about how to design experiences that are challenging and yet still work to minimize the consequences of errors, mistakes, and imperfections.

In this post, I’ll explore a few other forgiveness-adjacent game mechanics similar to coyote time. I won’t be suggesting specific teaching practices. Rather, I’ll discuss what I think these mechanics illuminate about the experience of playing a challenging yet forgiving game. By looking outside the world of teaching and learning for inspiration, I hope that we can think creatively about how to create the best possible experience for students. While I may mention a few teaching practices that come to mind, I will mostly be leaving the connections to you, dear reader.

Let’s dive in.

Like many people raised in a white Western settler culture, I was a self-righteous skeptic who’d been taught that plants, animals, and any other other-than-human entities were barely sentient and less than; meant to be used or dominated, not befriended, let alone viewed as equals. (Even the domesticated animals we consider family in most Western cultures are treated, to some extent, as objects we “own.”) I was human, elevated, civilized; everything else was nature, base, uncivilized. This was the inviolable order of things—until, of course, I put my hand on that tree, and definitively learned that it wasn’t.

There was nothing original about my “discovery.” The idea that everyone and every “thing” is alive, has inherent worth, and is interconnected is integral to communities and cosmologies across space and time. In many indigenous languages, there isn’t even a word for “nature” as some discrete, static entity. Quite the opposite: Aboriginal Australians’ conception of Country comprises a “sentient landscape” of waterways, air, land, humans, other-than-humans, ancestors, and their relationships—a way of being and relating so complex and antithetical to dualistic thinking that it threatens to blow the White Western mind.

It would take an ego death and a spiritual rebirth for me to allow it to change mine, and a healthy dose of decolonization to see just how profoundly lonely my anthropocentric individualism had made me. Luckily, a whole world of friends awaited me on the other side.

First, this seemed to be the best community to place this. Second, this is an older article [February 2024] but it is very interesting nonetheless.

Doctors said for Kilmartin to qualify for a kidney transplant, he’d have to lose 100 pounds, and obey a strict diet, one with hard-to-understand restrictions about components like phosphates and phosphorus. Too drained to cook, too overwhelmed by the cost of relying exclusively on takeout, and feeling guilty about burdening his worried wife, he turned to MANNA, the 35-year-old nonprofit that provides free, medically-tailored meals (MTMs) and education about how nutrition affects health conditions to Philadelphians who need it.

MANNA’s positive impact is more than anecdotal. Last month, the journal BMC Nutrition released research by The MANNA Institute, the research arm of MANNA, showing that its clients achieved a “significant decrease in malnutrition risk” and meaningful changes in conditions like diabetes and hypertension. ​​”This is the first of its kind,” explains Jule Anne Henstenburg, PhD, director of The MANNA Institute. “There has never been research involving an in-depth evaluation of a functioning medically tailored meal program.”

Among other compelling findings: Of the clients at risk for malnutrition when starting the program, 56 percent experienced a clinically significant reduction in malnutrition risk by program finish; 62 percent of clients with hypertension reduced their blood pressure by five or more units; among clients with diabetes, median hemoglobin A1C dropped from 8.3 percent to 7.7 percent, indicating improved blood sugar control. Body mass index (BMI) remained stable or decreased for 88 percent of clients who started the program with obesity.

The documentary and its accompanying book, New Wave: Rebellion and Reinvention in the Vietnamese Diaspora (2024), rewrites the narrative of Vietnamese Americans after the war in advance of the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Western popular culture has historically represented the Vietnamese people as either victims (refugees from the South) or enemies (communists from the North), gangsters or model minorities, leaving little room for nuance in depicting the experience of the over 45 million people who were forced to flee their home country. For refugees born in Vietnam who came to the United States between the ages of five and 12, or the so-called “1.5 Generation,” music allowed an escape from the binary between home and school, where they were pressured to uphold Vietnamese traditions and assimilate into American culture simultaneously.

Two new research papers challenge that view. Using creative new methods, they find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.

Their conclusion: In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.

Maaherra freely admitted she had copied The Urantia Book verbatim and defended her actions with a curious legal argument. Authorship, she contended, was something only humans could possess; since the papers were a direct transcription of the infallible revelations of an ensemble of celestial beings, the notions of authorship and copyright didn’t apply. The case reached the Ninth Circuit court of appeals, which ruled against her. Without questioning the extraterrestrial origins of the book’s revelations—both parties agreed about that, after all—the judges ruled that the utterances had been mediated by human beings before they reached print, constituting just enough of a human element to trigger authorship protections under the relevant copyright statute.

The court emphasized one kind of mediation, in particular: Sadler and the Forum “chose and formulated the specific questions asked.” These questions, the judges reasoned, “materially contributed to the structure of the Papers, to the arrangement of the revelations in each Paper, and to the organization and order in which the Papers followed one another.” Thus they found that “the ‘extremely low’ threshold level of creativity required for copyright protection has been met.”

[...] The prompt engineers who compiled The Urantia Book may have set a legal precedent for copyright in AI-generated works; Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra has already been cited in early AI cases in the United States. The legal battles over AI currently playing out—and the large number still to come—may profoundly impact the balance of wealth and power in countless democracies in the decades ahead.

For an idea of the scale of the prize, it’s worth remembering that 90 percent of recent U.S. economic growth, and 65 percent of the value of its largest 500 companies, is already accounted for by intellectual property. By any estimate, AI will vastly increase the speed and scale at which new intellectual products can be minted. The provision of AI services themselves is estimated to become a trillion-dollar market by 2032, but the value of the intellectual property created by those services—all the drug and technology patents; all the images, films, stories, virtual personalities—will eclipse that sum. It is possible that the products of AI may, within my lifetime, come to represent a substantial portion of all the world’s financial value.

In this light, the question of ownership takes on its true scale, revealing itself as a version of Bertolt Brecht’s famous query: To whom does the world belong?

As of this writing, AI companies have largely responded to lawsuits with defensiveness and evasion, refusing in most cases even to divulge what exact corpora of text their models are trained on. Some newspapers, less sure they can beat the AI companies, have opted to join them: the Financial Times, for one, minted a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI in April, while in July Perplexity launched a revenue-sharing “publisher’s program” that now counts Time, Fortune, Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com among its partners.

At the heart of these disputes, the input problem asks: Is it fair to train the LLMs on all that copyrighted text without remunerating the humans who produced it? The answer you’re likely to give depends on how you think about LLMs.

Your opinion on the input problem may come down to your view of the true nature of LLMs. Critics of generative AI tend to view its way of answering questions as only an elaborate cut-and-paste job performed on material written by humans—incapable even of showing genuine understanding of what it says, let alone of any Senecan transformation of what it reads. This view is forcefully articulated in the now-famous characterization of LLMs as “stochastic parrots” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. Boosters of the technology dispute this view—or counter that, if accurate, it also serves just as well to characterize the way human beings produce language. (As cartoonist Angie Wang wondered: “Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?”)

AI developers will doubtless argue that they need to be able to exploit the products of their models in order to incentivize innovation; licensors will argue that they need to be financially rewarded for all their efforts in fine-tuning AI models to produce the kind of outputs they seek. Hollywood studios will ask: How can we put AI to use in generating marvelous images for the whole family to enjoy if any Tom, Dick, or Harry can “steal” the characters, plots, and graphics it generates for us? How can we devote our expertise in fine-tuning AIs to design drugs, pharmaceutical companies will crow, if we can’t recoup our investment by controlling the market with intellectual property protections? These industries are extremely skilled in influencing the legal frameworks under which they operate; their efforts to strengthen and extend their intellectual property rights have resulted in a staggering and unequivocal series of victories. How can we expect the public domain, which has no financial heft, no army of lawyers, no investors and no lobbyists, to compete with that?

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17772988

A helpful guide on how to be less frustrating towards people of color.

Unlike for alcohol or heroin, there are no targeted medications to help drug users wean off stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine. While the deadly opioid crisis might make more headlines, 65 percent of drug-related deaths in California now involve stimulants, especially meth. Deaths from these kinds of stimulants more than quadrupled between 2011 and 2019, and the number of amphetamine-related E.R. visits increased nearly 50 percent between 2018 and 2020, according to an analysis by the Oakland nonprofit California Health Care Foundation. Therefore the state is urgently looking for new ways to rein in the drug crisis, and in early 2023, it began the controversial experiment: paying people to stay sober. This could be one part of the puzzle in securing an unexpected outcome: For the first time in decades, overdose deaths have plummeted by 10 percent between April 2023 and April 2024.

Two dozen counties, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Orange, are participating in the “recovery incentive” or “contingency management,” as it’s called. The state has allocated $60 million for the pilot phase. The 24-week program essentially uses positive reinforcement with the aim of readjusting people’s brains so they associate being sober with gratification. After each negative drug test, they receive a reward. For the first negative test, they get a gift card in the amount of $10, for the second $11.50, up to $26 or a total of $599 (because any amount larger than that needs to be reported to the IRS). It is part of a bigger initiative, CalAIM, to connect the most vulnerable and high-need citizens with resources and non-traditional benefits in a whole-person approach.

Most importantly, when clients test positive, there are no negative consequences. They simply don’t get their reward and drop back to the initial $10 the next time they deliver a negative test. “If they test positive, we take it as an opportunity to engage with them,” Duff explains. “We say, ‘We’re glad you’re here. Let’s sit down and talk about what happened.’ The goal is to keep them completely engaged. The longer they stay talking to a counselor, the better off their chances in the long run.”

But we assumed that they were male, to the point that we named one Rudolph.

Where does this myth come from, is it harmless, and what does it say about us?

Once upon a time, Nova Gorica and Gorizia were one; the two cities were created – and separated – in 1947 after World War Two when the Treaty of Paris established Europe's new borders, restricting travel between Italy and the former Yugoslavia. An Allied commission determined that Gorizia should belong to Italy and the less-developed part of town should be part of the Slovenian republic within the Socialist Federalist Republic of Yugoslavia. The new town was to be called Nova Gorica (New Gorizia), and from that moment on, Nova Gorica and Gorizia have existed as two towns split across two countries.

But with Slovenia's entry into the EU in 2004, the border between them was dissolved, allowing a cross-cultural exchange for the first time in generations. And in 2025, Gorizia/Nova Gorica will reunite as the first transnational European Capital of Culture, in a project called GO!2025.