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Collective Accountability in Digital Spaces

Note: I recently started writing a newsletter about the intersection of technology and governance, Hello, Governor! I’m still experimenting with format, content, etc, so feel free to give feedback about what you like or what you’d want to see.

It can be a struggle to hold groups accountable for misbehavior, even when the group is structured through legal forms, with public membership and clear leadership. On social media platforms populated by anonymous accounts, with membership and leadership often informal and invisible, accountability feels like a pipe dream.

And yet we urgently need accountability - for misinformation, for harassment, for exploitation, and for so much more. There is a deep anger towards social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, both for their negligence in allowing these problems to spread, but also because expressing anger towards them is our only mechanism for regulating online behavior. Lacking other options, we resort to demanding that specific users be banned and specific behavior suppressed.

Platforms protest - rightly, I believe - that they shouldn’t be in control of public debate. But this is also an evasion of responsibility. Companies could design mechanisms of accountability into their platforms, allowing users themselves to collectively control debate, but they have chosen not to. I suspect that, for all their rhetoric about empowering users, they are afraid to let users control what they see. What if they made decisions that hurt the company’s bottom line?  

Whatever their reasons, the failure of social tech companies to design accountability into their platforms has created this crisis. To understand what they might do differently, we can look at two long-established websites that offer us a glimpse of what’s possible.

Read more & sign up at the Hello, Governor! newsletter.

#governance #newsletter #hello governor

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Wrapping Up (Recurse Day 5)

It’s the last day of my mini-batch, although it’s not my last day at Recurse, since there’s an active alum community I’m eager to be a part of. I accomplished two major things on my codelibs projects today: I used a macro-generating macro to improve the templating language, turning this:     (code-template "add-story" (+ (blank "number" "n1" "A number: ") (blank "number" "n2" "Another number: "))) Into this:    (code-template "add-story" (+ (blanknum) (blanknum "A custom prompt!: "))) Those blanknum macros are generated by a define-blank macro that can create typed blanks with a default prompt. The second blanknum is using a custom prompt. You can also reuse the values of a given blank by passing in an optional ID argument and then passing in that same ID to subsequent blanks. I do still need to broaden the kinds of blanks users can work with beyond numbers and operators, but it’s good enough for now. I switched to added error handling. Now, when you give a non-number to a number blank or a string operator to a string blank, you get prompted to try again -- rather than breaking the whole program. I have a few things I want to finish up with this project. As I just mentioned, I want to broaden the kinds of blanks. I also want to provide the user with more information about the execution of their template, which I think requires understanding more about evaluators, which I’m in the process of researching. I also want to understand Lisp/Racket contracts, just because they seem neat. After that, I think I'm going to switch to looking at how the concepts I've learned in Racket translate to Python. I know Hy is a Lisp written in Python, there's also a couple of libraries that implement macros like macropy. And there's a few peps related to macros and other lisp-ish concepts I want to engage with. While I do like learning for learning’s sake, it would be lovely to be able to apply this knowledge in my work as a Python programmer.

#recurse #programming #racket #lisp

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Keep It Simple, Shauna (Recurse Day 4)

Today I finally tackled making a code madlibs program.  I spent the morning, though, reading the rest of the Fear of Macros tutorial. And perhaps I shouldn’t have - while it was engaging reading and I felt like I learned something, I spent much of the afternoon mired in confusion from trying to apply more advanced concepts/syntax than I really needed. This is more or less the same problem I had on Tuesday. I think it’s tempting when you run into a problem, especially in a new language, to think “oh! I don’t know enough! I need to learn more and then do more!” but sometimes you do already know enough. Except when you don’t. ;) I’ve put the final working code in a gist again. It’s not all that different from the story version of madlibs so far. The main difference is that we can’t just throw whatever we get back from the user into one long string of text. It needs to be converted into a number, an operator, etc. Tomorrow, I’d like to add a few more code elements for the user to potentially specify - I’d like for this to be more than just mathlibs. On the other hand, it seems fairly tedious to define a function to convert all of these code elements like I did with “string->procedure”. Perhaps I’ll investigate if there’s a more Lispish way to do it. I couldn’t find anything today, but I didn’t google very hard. Another thing I might do is see if I can’t print the full operation for the user, so they can see the steps as well as the result. Finally, it might be worth it to spend some time making this code robust. The code errors if the user gives it anything invalid.

#recurse #programming #lisp #racket #macros

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Macros, Finally (Recurse Day 3)

When we left off, I’d written some rather ugly code that gave us the basic features of a madlibs program without using any macros. But the whole point of this project is to better understand lisp macros. So today I focused on refactoring my program to use macros instead.

Luckily Recurser Greg Hendershott has written a truly excellent guide to working with macros called Fear of Macros. I spent the morning reading through the first part of it and learning the basics. Then, I made a little macro that took the name and prompt for a madlibs “blank” (eg, “adjective” and “Give an adjective: “) and created the necessary code so that the user is shown the prompt, and their response is recorded with the variable name provided. I also went back and rescued some code Tristan and I had written to store previous inputs in a hash so we can reuse variables in our templates. The code was already looking better, but I wanted more - I wanted the ability to create a bunch of story templates easily and then load the one I want by calling “tree-story” or “river-story” or “cat-story” from the interpreter. So I created a story-template macro that the blank macro was nested in. Here’s where I ran into the biggest trouble of the day. I just couldn’t figure out how to pass through the list which included the blank macros without executing them. I took a break to pair with Recurser Pavan. Pavan was really interested in my project but had never used a lisp before, so we spent the whole hour just talking about how my code, and Lisp/Racket itself, works. Explaining to somebody else was a fantastic way for me to get clearer on the concepts, and when I returned to debugging afterwards, refreshed, it was fairly easy to figure out the problem. Basically, my macro was trying to pass the inner macro through to an existing function, rather than constructing the function itself. Here’s the final working code. I’m really pleased with what I accomplished today, and grateful to both Greg and Pavan for their help. Looking forward to tomorrow!

#recurse #programming #lisp #macros

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Simple Code vs Fancy Code (Recurse Day 2)

Building off of yesterday’s work, today my hope was to finish my humble text-focused Madlibs program, so that I could move onto code-focused Madlibs tomorrow.  One of the first things I did today was change the language/dialect I was working in from Common Lisp to Racket. The REPL for Common Lisp was driving me up a wall, and the two suggestions I got from Recursers were switching to Emacs/Slime as an IDE or switching to Racket, which meant a different IDE and a slightly different language. At first I was leaning towards Slime, since switching an IDE sounded easer than re-writing all my code, but then I saw how good the Racket documentation was and how nice the IDE looked and changed my mind. Racket is great and re-writing my code wasn’t a big deal. The core concepts are the same, maybe not for the language as a whole but for the very basic code I wrote, and it was just twenty or thirty minutes debugging minor syntax errors.  I then moved on to trying to iterate on the project. The working version I had at the end of the day yesterday had no abstracted idea of a story. So the next step was creating a program that took in any story template and prompted users to provide an arbitrary number of fill-in-the-blanks. You can see the working code for that here. I was particularly pleased to discover the syntax for list comprehensions and how to unpack/spread a list. However! If you look at that code, you’ll notice that the templates rely entirely on order to figure out which user responses go where, which also means they can’t reuse answers. For instance, if I want a story like “There was a pirate named X. X said ‘ahoy!’” I would have to prompt the user for X twice. 

So I went off in search of the Racket equivalent of Python’s f-strings. Someone suggested at-expressions, but AFAICT with those the values need to be interpolated at compile time while for this project the values are received from the user at runtime. You can see my totally ineffectual effort to deal with this problem here. Towards the end of the day Recurser Tristan offered to pair and we worked out a simpler solution that didn’t involve any fancy namespacing or syntax definition or calls to eval. You can find it here; it’s a little verbose but it does what I want in a relatively straightforward way. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I fully believe it’s best to do things as simply as possible. On the other hand this is a learning exercise meant to help me understand Lisp/Racket’s macro system. Should I do yet another iteration that makes use of macros somehow, for the sake of using macros? How do I know that this problem even could make use of macros? I think my plan tomorrow will be to start on the code version of Madlibs (Codelibs!!), but we’ll see.

#recurse #programming #racket #lisp

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Recurse Day 1

Day 1 of my Recurse mini batch is complete! I spent a good portion of it meeting people and learning about the community, but I did also make some small steps on my project:

1) I read through two tutorials, one on lisp generally and one on macros

2) I successfully got the simplest possible version of my project working:

;; 1. Simplest possible version (defun cat-story (cat-name cat-location) (format t "There once was a cat named ~a who lived in ~b" cat-name cat-location)) ;; 2. Prompt in REPL for cat-name and cat-location? (defvar cat-name) ; avoid warnings (defvar cat-location) ; avoid warnings (progn (format t "What is the cat's name? ") (force-output) (setq cat-name (read-line)) (format t "Where does the cat live? ") (force-output) (setq cat-location (read-line)) (cat-story cat-name cat-location))

This version hard codes a story template and story variables, and the prompts are completely separate from the variables. But it does fulfil the very basic essence of a Madlibs program. :)

3) Wrote a next attempt which doesn’t work yet:

(setq story-elements (list (list "There once was a cat named ~cat-name who lived in ~cat-location") (list "cat-name" "What is the cat's name?") (list "cat-location" "What is the cat's location?"))) ;; for now assume there are exactly three atoms in story, the first of which is the template (defun tell-story (story) (format t (second story)) (force-output) (setq var1 (read-line)) (format t (third story)) (force-output) (setq var2 (read-line)) (format t (first story) var1 var2)) (tell-story story-elements)

4) I got some advice to check out Racket, Slime for Emacs, and the Common Lisp plugin for Slime for Emacs. Generally speaking, I am wrestling with the “how much time should I spend setting up my development environment?” question. With such a short batch, I don’t want to get two in the weeds. OTOH I am finding my current setup pretty annoying.

Overall, a good first day!

#programming #recurse #lisp

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My Plans for Recurse

Next week I'll be doing a mini-batch at Recurse. I'm planning to blog about it each day, and I figured I'd start by laying out my plans for the week. My goal is to learn more about Lisp and in particular, its macro system. I've been trying to understand metaprogramming better and I see recommendations to "check out Lisp and its macro system" a lot. I've already got some suggestions of lispy things to read from Recursers, which I'm hoping to look through this weekend so I can get a running start. The toy project, which will hopefully be a good vehicle for learning, will be a madlibs program. The first iteration will be "normal" madlibs - that is you, you feed it story templates and then users can generate a silly version by putting in random verbs, nouns, etc. This will give me a chance to get used to lisp’s syntax and how you actual construct a program in it. The second iteration will be code madlibs, where you feed it code templates and users can provide random variables, operators, or maybe even classes or functions. The newly generated program will be executed and, ideally, the process and result will be documented and returned to the user. I've taken to calling the second iteration codelibs in my head. This is an ambitious project which I probably won’t finish by the end of the week. I'm hoping to take advantage of the many collaborative opportunities Recurse offers to pair, have discussions, etc, and I'll be prioritizing those. Regardless, I'm looking forward to it.

#programming #metaprogramming #recurse

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A Bug Report

I just fixed a Django bug that took me ages to solve. Part of why it took so long is that the errors I was getting weren’t surfacing the right search results. So, in case anyone ever has a similar problem, I will record what happened here and hope the search algorithms send this their way. My project has a Vue-based front end that queries the Django backend fairly regularly for data. My tests started to fail non-deterministically, with DoesNotExist errors popping up here and there. At the same time, but not always on the same tests, I started having difficulty cleanly finishing my tests. I’d get notifications that the database couldn’t be destroyed because something was still connected (ie “Got an error the test database: database is being accessed by other users; DETAIL:  There is 1 other session using the database.”) I spent a long time trying to hunt down the DoesNotExist exceptions and eventually satisfied myself that it was some kind of database connection issue because Django would go from saying “here’s your object!” to “nope, doesn’t exist” literally on the next line. This fit with the problems destroying the database. However, I don’t know very much about how Django manages databases. I started reading the docs in an effort to better understand what might be going wrong. I was briefly excited by this note that using LiveServerTestCase (which I was) caused tests to randomly fail (which they were) but then I saw it was only for Sqlite back ends, and I’m using postgres. Eventually, many pages into a google search for answers, I found this blog post, which warns that every time a Django view queries the database, that query is wrapped in a transaction. If two queries happen at once, the second may fail since the row being queried is unreadable. The blog post sort of brushes off the solution of using a non_atomic_requests decorator, but since the problematic view is entirely read_only, that solution worked for me.

#django #coding #bug reports

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Knowledge workflows

I have read a great many non-fiction books in my life, and I remember the details of heartbreakingly few of them. Over the last year or so, I have worked to change that pattern.

There are a number of modern tools that make it so much easier to take good notes and synthesize them into an accessible and fertile knowledge base. For the last year or so, I’ve been storing notes (and other information) into a Roam graph. I won’t dive too deep into how Roam works but this is a great overview - although it doesn’t even mention my favorite thing about Roam, which is block references (which make it super easy to include text in multiple locations while remaining one canonical version) or any of the cool new plugins like Smartblocks and themes. If you want to know more there are plenty of great videos or you can email me and I’ll talk your ear off about it. Anyway, storing notes hasn’t been a problem for a while, but getting my notes into Roam has been. Today I finally solved that problem with Readwise. Readwise is kind of like a Zapier for notes and highlights (with a little bit of Anki - aka spaced repetition - along the way). I haven’t used any of the space repetition yet, but I have used it to move notes from Instapaper to Roam and it’s seamless.  What really blew me away is that Readwise lets you take photos of physical books and papers, and has a really easy and effective flow where it OCRs the text, lets you double check it for errors and clip only the bit you want, add a note and page number to the highlight, and saves it.  Today I read a chapter of a new book (Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina) and took a ton of notes this way - and with no additional work of my own they’re now sitting in their own page in Roam.

I’m just so happy to have found this set of tools, and to live in a time period where these tools can exist. Humanity is so inventive! I just wish we were better at other things, like trusting each other and caring about each other.

#knowledge #note-taking #roam #readwise #let's get back in the blogging habit

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What’s standing in the way of women’s soccer?

When chants of ‘equal pay!’ ring through soccer stadiums, men jump on Twitter to explain why, despite performing better internationally than the men’s team, women soccer players don’t deserve equal pay because they don’t earn as much revenue.

Over the past two months I’ve become a big NWSL fan.  It’s very different from being an MLB fan, my only previous experience of passionate sports fandom.  There are a lot of things I take for granted that a professional sports team has, which NWSL teams do not have.  These things absolutely affect revenue, either directly, or by lowering the quality of play or the experience of watching games.  Here’s a list.

1.  NWSL stadiums are less accessible than MLS and other stadiums.

My local team, the Washington Spirit, plays at the Maryland SoccerPlex.  To get to the Plex, if you don’t have a car, requires an hour-plus train ride to the end of the metro and then either a 25+ minute car ride or a 45+ bus ride.  I have multiple friends who’ve expressed interested in going to a game but balked when they found out how long it would take to get there.  Another friend had to cancel because she was working late and couldn’t finish by 5:30pm, which was the time she’d have to leave to make it to a 7:30pm game.

As a trial run, the Spirit are playing a game tomorrow at Audi Field, home field of the MLS team DC United.  Audi Field is about 30 minutes away from downtown and is easily accessible via Metro.  Correspondingly, the Spirit is on track to more than triple their season record at the Plex.  They may even sell out Audi Field.  Surely if they can sell out Audi Field, they deserve to play in it?

Which brings me to the next item on the list...

2.  NWSL stadiums are smaller than MLS stadiums.

The Spirit’s plex sells out at around 5,500 tickets.  For tomorrow’s Audi Field game, they’ve currently sold over 16,000 tickets.

Sky Blue’s regular park also holds about 5,000 fans.  When they played a game last weekend at Red Bull Arena, aka the stadium of their local MLS team, they nearly doubled attendance at 9,000+ tickets sold.

I don’t know the breakdown for every team in the league.  I do know that Orlando Pride, despite having access to a great stadium, tends to draw fewer fans do to their lower quality of play.  (They’re second to last in the league.)  On the other hand, the Portland Thorns already share a stadium with their MLS neighbor team, the Timbers, and also boast the biggest and loudest fanbase in the NWSL.  Portland recently set a league record with 25,000+ tickets sold to a game.

Items #1 and #2 combine to make clear that to grow as a league, NWSL teams need to play in larger stadiums that are easier to access.  (This doesn’t even take into account how stadium facilities might impact quality of play.  Some NWSL teams don’t even have showers in their locker rooms!)  Owners and league managers need to invest in securing these spaces for teams, even if they might not be profitable at first. The experience of Sky Blue and Spirit suggests that managers won’t have to wait to reap the benefits.  

3.  NWSL games are often scheduled simultaneously, decreasing viewership.

With only nine teams in the NWSL, there are four to six NWSL games each week.  Given this small number, you’d think they’d all be on at different times, right?

Nope.  Every week, there’s at least one pair of games scheduled against each other.  Often there’s two.  If you don’t have the ability to tape games, you’re forced to miss at least one game every week.  As I have taken to tweeting despairingly at the NWSL each time this happens: whyyyyyyyy.

Schedule creation is complicated, and there are more factors that go into it than I know of.  But one key element is when teams even have their field available.  Most teams don’t own their own fields, and have to work within a restricted subset of dates and times.  To the extent that this contributed to overlapping games, it’s yet another way that issues securing good stadiums get in the way of fans supporting their teams.

4.  NWSL teams have a lower quality of commentating.

Complaining about the announcers/commentators on NWSL matches is a sport of its own.  Announcers regularly mispronounce players’ names and sometimes misidentify them.  They repeat facts and stories, and use the same turns of phrase over and over until you can’t help but twitch every time you hear them say “she sprays the ball out wide” or “the ball found it’s way to...” The last Spirit game I attended, I sat in front of a woman who, after Elise Kellond-Knight left with a pulled hamstring, briefly explained to her friends why women were more likely than men to have hamstring injuries.  (It has something to do with women having more developed quad muscles, which puts the opposing muscles, the hamstrings, at greater risk.  This also leads to increased ACL injuries among women.)  This random stranger had more interesting commentary than any of the people I’d heard on TV. But why are these announcers so bad?  The answer’s easy: NWSL announcers are barely paid.  They make $300-$400 a game, with no travel or lodging expenses paid, which means unless you live in Fort Lauderdale where the announcing is recorded, you have to pay to announce.   I don’t know how much MLS announcers make, but I bet it’s better than that.

5.  NWSL teams have a lower quality of refereeing.

Oh boy.  Okay.  There have been some issues with NWSL refereeing lately.  As national team star Ali Krieger put it:

We’re putting a good product out on the field and every year we’re getting better and the referees seem like they are not.  So, I beg the NWSL — just the standard needs to be higher. It’s just unfortunate that you feel like the referee is ruining the game. They are taking the fun out of the game because they are not good enough.

How could we raise the standards of referees?  Well, they could stop treating the NWSL like a training ground for MLS:

There are five tiers in the U.S. Soccer refereeing program. The top-level, called “FIFA,” is the highest tier. These referees can officiate in FIFA-sanctioned matches. 

”The second tier is “P.R.O.” These referees can officiate MLS matches and are selected by the Professional Referee Organization.

The next tier down is called “National,” and these officials are certified by U.S. Soccer. These referees can officiate USL Championship and NWSL matches. And therein lies the problem.

The NWSL will never have officiating as good as the MLS as long as this remains US Soccer’s official policy.  It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

6.  NWSL games are not marketed as well as they could be.

I won’t pretend to understand marketing, but I know that it’s hard for people to go to games they don’t even know about: 

[Portland Thorns defender Meghan Klingenberg ] couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when she saw Fox discuss the U.S. Men’s National Team’s run at the CONCACAF Gold Cup during halftime of the Women’s World Cup final Sunday, rather than preview the upcoming games in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).

“I love Fox. I think they did a great job. They gave the Women’s World Cup the attention that it deserves, but I wish we mentioned the NWSL more. [...] We need that to be put into the consciousness of the general public. We need ESPN to talk about the NWSL year-round. We need beat reporters in every single city that has an NWSL team. We need investment in advertising and marketing, in ground support, in make sure that people know that there’s a freaking team in their area.”  [source]

It seems that marketing is another area in which US Soccer is underinvesting in women:

[Soccer United Marketing, the commercial arm of Major League Soccer] handles deals for MLS and the U.S. Soccer Federation but not the NWSL, even though U.S. Soccer runs the NWSL. This fact has long been lamented by the women’s soccer community.

The NWSL marketing team needs the resources to at least let people know that their teams exist and their games are happening.  But beyond that... the NWSL is full of charismatic stars, both current and potential.  Let’s give them the spotlight.

7.  NWSL salaries are, for all but the biggest stars, below average income.

No one goes into women’s soccer for the money, even if a few of the game’s biggest stars have managed to get some lucrative sponsorships.  The league guarantees a minimum salary of $16,538, barely above the poverty line, and caps max salary at $46,200, a bit belong the mean American income.

Talented young women who are making decisions about where to go to college and what to do after college need to take this into account.  If they have dependents, family members with health issues, or significant debt, they simply may not be able to afford to play soccer professionally.  

This impacts the number of women available to play professionally as well as their ability to nurture their own talent by investing in themselves via special camps and training.  For every Megan Rapinoe or Alex Morgan or Crystal Dunn who has made it to the NWSL there’s someone equally talented who stopped playing in high school or college because law school or medical school or learning to code seemed like a more financially viable career path.  

In other words, for all the strides women’s soccer has made over the last twenty to thirty years, the NWSL still selecting from only a fraction of the potential talent pool.

*

I’ve been an NWSL fan for less than two months, so I’m surely missing other ways that women’s soccer has been under-invested in.  But the seven issues outlined above should be enough to convince you there’s a problem.  

Saying that people just don’t want to watch women’s soccer isn’t merely an oversimplification - it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The whole point of investment is you take a risk now to reap a payoff later.  The NWSL needs US Soccer and the wider sports community to invest in them, and given time, everyone will benefit.

You know what keeps ringing in my ears?  Research that shows that men are judged on their potential, while women are only judged on their performance.  The NWSL has the potential to be a thriving league with the revenues and fan enthusiasm of the MLS.  The question is whether women’s soccer will be given the support they need to deliver on that potential.

#soccer #nwsl

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Linkspam #7

Top Links

Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy by Nan Estad at Boston Review:

Business schools fetishize entrepreneurial innovation, but their most prominent heroes succeeded because they manipulated corporate law, not because of personal brilliance.

Capitalism, like the United States itself, has a mythology, and for five decades one of its central characters has been the nineteenth-century maverick cigarette entrepreneur, James B. Duke. Duke’s risk-taking investment in the newfangled machine-made cigarette, so the story goes, displaced the pricey, hand-rolled variety offered by his stodgy competitors. This, in turn, won Duke control of the national, and soon global, cigarette market. Repeated ad nauseam in business and history journals, high school and university curricula, popular magazines, and websites, the story has taught that disruptive innovation drives capitalist progress.

The problem? The Duke story is false: mid-century business historians fabricated it to accord with the theory of creative destruction, developed by libertarian economist Joseph Schumpeter. For generations, we have learned from this myth to fetishize entrepreneurial innovation as the engine of capitalism, while missing Duke’s instrumental role in rampant corporate empowerment.

Air Pods Are a Tragedy by Caroline Haskins at Vice:

Even if you only own AirPods for a few years, the earth owns them forever. When you die, your bones will decompose in less than a century, but the plastic shell of AirPods won’t decompose for at least a millennium. Thousands of years in the future, if human life or sentient beings exist on earth, maybe archaeologists will find AirPods in the forgotten corners of homes. They’ll probably wonder why they were ever made, and why so many people bought them. But we can also ask ourselves those same questions right now.

The Cis White Gay Man at a Crossroads by Tim Murphy at Into:

To ally oneself with power and privilege after historically having one’s own inherent gender and racial privilege compromised because of one’s sexuality is extremely seductive. It’s also uncomfortable, to say the least, to know that your new bros are perpetuating cruelties that you know in your gut to be real because, especially if you are an older gay man, you remember such cruelties to the point that your voice rises and breaks when you allude to them.

It can be so uncomfortable that, in the next breath, you deny their authenticity. People who feel vulnerable and unsafe, you say, enjoy playing the victim. Your new status in the world depends on not connecting your own former, or fleeting, suffering to theirs.

Privileged by Kyle Korver at the Player’s Tribune:

When the police break your teammate’s leg, you’d think it would wake you up a little.

When they arrest him on a New York street, throw him in jail for the night, and leave him with a season-ending injury, you’d think it would sink in. You’d think you’d know there was more to the story.

You’d think.

But nope.

Women suffer needless pain because almost everything is designed for men by Sigal Samuel, interviewing Caroline Criado Perez, for Vox:

Sigal Samuel: Can you give an example of a drug that’s been found to be less effective for women?

Caroline Criado Perez:  The most shocking one was a heart medication that was meant to prevent heart attacks but at a certain point in a woman’s menstrual cycle is actually more likely to trigger a heart attack. That has to do with the problem of not testing the drug on women at different stages of their menstrual cycle, because you [the researcher] say, “Oh, that’s too complicated and too expensive.” You’re basically saying, “I would rather let women die than have to do a complicated test.”

It Wasn’t Just the Trolls: Early Internet Culture, “Fun,” and the Fires of Exclusionary Laughter by Whitney Philips in Social Media + Society:

Very quickly, I realized that many of the young reporters who initially helped amplify the white nationalist “alt right” by pointing and laughing at them, had all come up in and around internet culture-type circles. They may not have been trolls themselves, but their familiarity with trolling subculture, and experience with precisely the kind of discordant swirl featured in the aforementioned early-2000s image dump, perfectly prepped them for pro-Trump shitposting. They knew what this was. This was just trolls being trolls. This was just 4chan being 4chan. This was just the internet. Those Swastikas didn’t mean anything. They recognized the clothes the wolf was wearing, I argued, and so they didn’t recognize the wolf.

This was how the wolf operated: by exploiting the fact that so many (white) people have been trained not to take the things that happen on the internet very seriously. They operated by laundering hate into the mainstream through “ironically” racist memes, then using all that laughter as a radicalization and recruitment tool.

Other Favorites

Science

Going Critical by Kevin Simler at Melting Asphalt - cool interactive post about criticality in networks

I Got Tenure, But Science is Still Broken by Ryan Abernathey at Medium

From sick role to practices of health and illness by Arthur W Frank in the journal Medical Education

Technology

Google Is Eating Our Mail by Tomaž Šolc at Avian’s Blog - what happens when a private company gets to decide what email is worth receiving

Coding Is For Everyone - As Long As You Speak English by Gretchen McCullough at Wired

YouTube Disabled Comments On Livestreams Of A Congressional Hearing On White Nationalism Because They Were Too Hateful by Ryan Broderick at Buzzfeed News - “Tuesday's hearing was meant to examine the rise of white nationalism and white supremacy and the role social media plays in its spread. Then the comments got hijacked.”

Thinking through ACL-aware data processing by Lea Kissner at the The International Association of Privacy Professionals “Privacy Tech” blog

A Conspiracy To Kill IE6 by Chris Zacharias at their personal blog

History

Liberalism and Jewish Emancipation by Mark Koyama at Liberal Currents - how Jews became full citizens of England

Politics

Is Josh Hawley For Real? by Alexander Zaitchik at the New Republic - A terrifying analysis of the “post-liberal” movement.  “Stated simply, the post-liberals reject universal reason as a basis for laws and government. They mourn the institutions, values, and hierarchies that secular rationalism has laid to waste in the name of progress.”

The families funding the 2016 presidential election by the New York Times

Identity politics strengthens democracy by Stacy Abrams in Foreign Affairs

Misc

How to Draw a Horse by Emma Hunsinger in the New Yorker

My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me. by Wil S Hylton at the New York Times

The Untold Story of the Ermahgerd Girl by Darryn King at Vanity Fair

Stoicism’s Appeal to the Rich and Powerful by Ada Palmer at Ex Urbe

What If A City Decides It Can Live Without A Freeway? by Nathanael Johnson - “Inside the push to tear down an Oakland freeway”

Put down the self-help books. Resilience is not a DIY endeavour by Michael Ungar at the Globe and Mail

What Could Have Been by Sophia Steinert-Evoy at Jewish Currents - “I realized: I was watching two Jewish American millennials sing about the crisis of Jewish identity created by the State of Israel on a nationally syndicated television show. But in its subtlety, the performance doesn’t make a statement so much as it opens a line of questioning—starting with What could have been? and leading, perhaps, to: How do we move forward?”

#linkspam

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Linkspam #6

Top Links

It’s a Crisis of Civilization in Mexico by José de Córdoba at the Wall Street Journal:

In Huitzuco, a town in the lawless state of Guerrero, Mario Vergara, a slightly built, voluble man nicknamed the Atomic Ant, pores over medical books, training himself to recognize bones of the human skeleton. In six years of searching for his brother, a taxi driver kidnapped in 2012, Mr. Vergara and his crew have dug up some 60 clandestine graves and found the remains of some 200 people, he said.

Mr. Vergara believes he too will be disappeared by criminals who don’t want their sins unearthed. He has made a cast of his teeth so searchers will find it easier to identify him when he’s gone. 

How Did Larry Nasser Deceive So Many for So Long? by Kerry Howley at The Cut

Although, much later, the only story line American media would be able to process was one of a “survivor” who had “found her voice” and was ready to “take on” her abuser in open court, it did not appear to be a woman at all who had persuaded those closest to this story, including most of the “survivors,” to come forward. It was, rather, a set of external hard drives — tossed to the curb in the trash in the days after Denhollander went public, on a day when the garbage crew was behind schedule, and recovered by a police officer. Had the crew been on time, had the officer been late, had the warrant come through a day after Nassar decided to dump his digital history on the street, he might still have the support of most of the people he abused.

Framed Up by Hendrik Hertzberg at The New Yorker:

Here's a little thought experiment, inspired by Dahl's reflections. Imagine, if you can, that African-Americans were represented "fairly" in the Senate. They would then have twelve senators instead of, at present, zero, since black folk make up twelve per cent of the population. Now imagine that the descendants of slaves were afforded the compensatory treatment to which the Constitution entitles the residents of small states. Suppose, in other words, that African-Americans had as many senators to represent them as the Constitution allots to the twelve per cent of Americans who live in the least populous states. There would be forty-four black senators. How's that for affirmative action?

“I Don’t Want To Shoot You, Brother” by Joe Sexton at ProPublica:

“It’s the Blue Lives Matter More theory of policing,” he said. “When in doubt, shoot. If you can shoot, you should shoot. If you have the choice of waiting that one second to see if you could protect the citizen’s life and put your own life at risk, you must take the citizen’s life.”

The Fallout by Lacy M Johnson at Guernica:

We are all connected. The rivers and streams and tiny creeks wind through the city and go on winding. They twist and bend and run backward on themselves, changing course and direction a thousand times over the ages. The water swells and leaves its banks with the seasons, swells into the streets we build, and our backyards and gardens, into the places we never think of because we do not want to see them: our landfills, our factories, our toxic dumps, all of the remote places we send our worst creations. There is no fence to keep it all out. The disaster that approaches is ourselves.

Other Favorites

Science

Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? by Rowan Jacobsen at Outside Online - from the lede: “Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific, controversial new research suggests—and quite possibly even racist. How did we get it so wrong?”

Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber by Alston Chase at the Atlantic - how the weaponization of psychology helped create a terrorist

Open Letter to Psychology Today by Margena Carter at PitchEngine - Psychology Today has been around for over 50 years, and they’ve only ever had three people of color on their cover.

Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science by Ava Kofman at the New York Times Magazine

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial by Yeh et al in BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal)

Technology

The Digital Maginot Line by Renee DiResta at RibbonFarm 

The Disinformation Report by New Knowledge 

The Data Scientist Tracking America’s White Supremacists by Matthew Gault at MotherBoard 

Free as in … ? by Luis Villa at their personal blog - how the capability approach to freedom might apply to free software

Supporting Int 1696-2017 for Source Code Transparency in New York City by Sumana Harihareswara

Why Pinterest is Better Than Facebook at Stopping Fake News by Rebecca Watson at Skepchick

Mutmut by Ned Batchelder at his personal blog - Ned reviews a mutation testing library written in Python

Protecting Basecamp from breached passwords by Jeremy Daer at Signal v Noise

History

How ‘Strange Fruit’ Killed Billie Holiday by Brandon Weber at The Progressive

How the Willie Horton Ad Played on Racism and Fear by Erin Blakemore at History.com

The Homer We Want by Bill Beck at Eidolon - a history of misquotation

Carrie Ann Lucas Dies At Age 47. You Probably Haven't Heard Of Her And That's A Problem by Sarah Kim at Forbes 

Politics

The Unsatisfying Truth About Hateful Online Rhetoric And Violence by Joseph Bernstein at BuzzFeed News

‘I Get Called a Russian Bot 50 Times a Day’ by Shawn Musgrave at Politico

Progressive prosecutors are not 'cops.' They are needed to enact criminal justice reform by Denise Oliver Velez at DailyKos

Affordable Housing Is Disappearing. These Mobile Home Residents Are Fighting to Protect Theirs by Emma Whitford at Time

Rep. Rashida Tlaib cursing got 5 times more coverage on cable news than Rep. Steve King embracing white supremacy by Lis Power, Rob Savillo and Steve Morris at Media Matters for America 

The Most Sobering Thing about the Racial Dot Map by Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism

is “toxic femininity” a thing? by Katie Anthony at their personal blog

The Justice System Runs On Testimonial, ‘He-Said She-Said’ Evidence by Michele Sharpe at the Establishment

The Class Ceiling: The ‘Hidden Mechanisms’ That Help Those Born Rich to Excel in Elite Jobs by Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic

Arts & Pop Culture

You Probably Owe "Jennifer's Body" An Apology by Louis Peitzman at Buzzfeed News

What White, Western Audiences Don’t Understand About Marie Kondo’s ‘Tidying Up’ by Margaret Dilloway at HuffPost

Depression and Duty in Captain America: The Winter Soldier by Ryan Roch at Lewton Bus 

Is ‘Captain Marvel’ military propaganda? by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw at the Daily Dot  (if you can’t tell, I’m going through a Marvel phase)

Fan Fiction vs Fanfiction by Flourish Klink at Medium

Misc

Quiet Hands by Julia Bascom at Just Stimming

Big Charity as Big Capital by Phil at All That Is Solid

Having Sex When Your Partner Is The Same Gender, But A Different Size by Lauren Strapagiel at BuzzFeed News

I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It. by Kevin Alexander at Thrillist

She Thought She Was In Bed With Her Boyfriend, Until She Saw His Face by David Mack at BuzzFeed News

On Consensus and Humming in the IETF by P. Resnick

After Two White Colorado Women Unearthed The History Of Their Slave-Owning Ancestors, They Turned To Reparations by Ann Marie Awad at Colorado Public Radio

The Philosopher Redefining Equality by Nathan Heller at the New Yorker - a profile of Elizabeth Anderson (”one of the two greatest living philosophers” according to my philosophy professor friend)

The numbers behind workplace discrimination by Maryam Jameel, Leslie Shapiro and Joe Yerardi at the Washington Post

Rent and reputation by Siderea at their personal blog

#linkspam

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A Song for Occupations #4

The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are, The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him, The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them, The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you, Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the going and coming of commerce and mails, are all for you.

List close my scholars dear, Doctrines, politics and civilization exurge from you, Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere are tallied in you, The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reach is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same, If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be? The most renown'd poems would be ashes, orations and plays would be vacuums.

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it, (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments, It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of the women's chorus, It is nearer and farther than they.

- Walt Whitman

#poetry

[an-ephemeral-blog]

Legacies of Disruption

“Many scientists prefer not to think about politics, but the work that scientists do has always had political consequences, from the quiet tragedy of an understudied disease to the undeniable horror of a city destroyed in an instant.

This, too, is the situation of many technologists. We’d like to think our work apolitical, even as the counterexamples pile up: corporations and governments surveilling citizens, black-box algorithms that tell us what news to read and which people to trust, world leaders threatening nuclear war on Twitter.

Why do we shy away from the political nature of our work? What happens when politics can no longer be ignored? The history of the atomic bomb may provide some answers.“

<<read more>>

#writing #articles #history #science #politicization of science #technology

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Super Princess Saves the Night

Almost five years ago now, frustrated by the lack of trans-inclusive children’s books that my best friends’ kids had as options, I sat down and wrote a story about a tiny trans/gender non-conforming superhero named Super Princess.  It’s so exciting to finally be able to put this book out into the world.  This is a story about the magic of empathy and the importance of approaching the world with love instead of fear.  

All profits are being donated to the Trans Women of Color Collective.

Learn more about Super Princess and buy the book here.

#writing #projects

[an-ephemeral-blog]

Linkspam #5

Top Links

How to Survive America's Kill List by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone - an American citizen’s fight to escape assassination by the US executive branch:

The question before Collyer would challenge the most gifted legal mind. At issue is the fact that America, in the wake of 9/11, has become two countries.  One is a democracy, visible to the population and governed by the lofty laws and rules and constitutional principles we learned about in Schoolhouse Rock.  The second nation is an authoritarian state-within-a-state, governed exclusively by the executive branch. In this parallel world, all rights redound to a bureaucracy that may kill anyone it pleases at any time, restrained only by the inclinations of the executive.  Essentially, Kareem’s lawyers are appealing to the first America – Collyer’s courtroom – to force the second, secret America to hear him out.

Nobody seems to know what would happen if Kareem or Zaidan tried to come to court, another thing that makes this case uniquely bizarre. Would Kareem be allowed to walk in and take a seat at the plaintiff’s table? Would he be placed under arrest outside the courthouse? Stuffed in the trunk of a Crown Victoria at the airport?

America’s Uncivil Protests Are Straight Out of Latin America by Omar G. Encarnación at Foreign Policy:

Two central questions are raised by the arrival of the escrache on U.S. shores: Do they work, and are they any good for democracy? Based on the Latin American experience and that of Spain, where escraches became a massive political headache in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the answer to the first question is a resounding yes. The tactic can serve to raise societal awareness about moral wrongs; it can also promote solidarity across a variety of causes. Most important, however, it can lead to a change in policy and even transform politics. The answer to the second question is less clear: The escrache is an unambiguous assault on civility — but it’s also a telling sign that something is already very rotten in the body politic.

The Queer Art of Failing Better by Laurie Penny at the Baffler:

Give a man a makeover and you fix him for a day; teach a man that masculinity under late capitalism is a toxic pyramid scheme that is slowly killing him just like it’s killing the world, and you might just fix a sucking hole in the future.

In the age of Trump, can Mr. Rogers help us manage our anger? by David Dark at America Magazine:

As he nears the end of his testimony, he asks if he might recite a song whose title is the question of the hour (maybe every hour): “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” It is as if he has treated everyone present to a psychic blast of blessedness. Rogers pauses to note that the question was purloined from a child struggling with this very issue aloud. We each have the power to stop, stop, stop, Rogers instructs, as he gently strikes the table, when we have planned something, in word or action, that will go badly for ourselves and others. There is something deep within us—an inner resource, our intuition, our core—that can come to our aid when we need it most. Our feelings, we can access the realization at any moment, are mentionable and manageable. We can become what we are supposed to be.

Other Favorites

Science

A Pottery Barn rule for scientific journals by Sanjay Srivastava at his personal blog - “Once a journal has published a study, it becomes responsible for publishing direct replications of that study.”  Best paired with Reproducibility meets accountability: introducing the replications initiative at Royal Society Open Science.

The day when three NASA astronauts staged a strike in space by Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times

The Evolution of High-Speed Throwing by Neil Thomas Roach at their personal blog

MTurk vs. The Lab: Either Way We Need Big Samples by Joe Simmons at Data Colada - brb emailing this to every researcher I know

The Science Wars Redux by Michael Bérubé at Democracy - on the Sokal hoak, postermodernism, objectivity, multiplicity, and the way the right has appropriated leftist critique

After the methods crisis, the theory crisis by Tom Stafford at Mind Hacks - a recommendation of a list of recommendations ;)

Spoiled Science: How a seemingly innocent blog post led to serious doubts about Cornell’s famous food laboratory by Tom Bartlett at the Chronicle

Tech

The woman who taught internet strangers to actually care for one another by Claire Evans at Quartz - “Rather than deputized members of our own community, they are a precarious workforce on the front lines of digital trauma.” On digital community moderation and how it’s changed over the last thirty years.

ASLCore: stress/strain curve zoom levels by Mel Chua - on the art and science of translating engineering terms into ASL

UTC is enough for everyone, right? by Zach Holman - a history of time and programming with time

Saving a non-profit six figures a year using Squarespace, Airtable and Glitch.com by Danilo Campos at Future Fluent

Kara Swisher interviews Mark Zuckerberg for ReCode

IP addresses & routing by Julia Evans at their personal blog

Out-of-the-Silicon-Valley-funding-box by Hallie Montoya Tansey at their personal blog

Reading postmortems by Dan Luu at their personal blog

CSS Utility Classes and Separation of Concerns by Adam Wathan at their personal blog - via Julia Evans

Careful with negative assertions by Ned Batchelder at his personal blog - included largely for Jonathan Hartley’s comment 

On Testing by Bill Sempf at his personal blog - this is basically just a roundup of testing jokes made on Twitter but I love it

Politics

From Charleston to Pittsburgh, an Arc of Premeditated American Tragedy by Jelani Cobb at the New Yorker

Putting a Face (Mine) to the Risks Posed by GOP Games on Mueller Investigation by Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel

How Contemporary Antitrust Robs Workers of Power by Sandeep Vaheesan at Law and Political Economy

Sorry to Bother You by Liza Featherstone at The Baffler - participation in modern politics

The junk debt that tanked the economy? It’s back in a big way. by Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post - collateralized loan obligations are the new subprime mortages

‘Red’ America is an illusion. Postindustrial towns go for Democrats. and This is why Democrats lose in ‘rural’ postindustrial America by Jonathan Rodden in the Washington Post

John Roberts and the Second Redemption Court by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic

History

A two-part podcast on the only successful coup d’etat in American history by Stuff You Missed In History Class

Follow up: UNC's Football Stadium: Memorial to the Leader of a White Supremacist Massacre by Craig Calcaterra at their personal blog

When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig by George Prochnik at the New Yorker - Zweig was an Austrian who fled Europe in 1941, so this is a reflection on the rise of Nazism in particular

A twitter thread by Kevin Kruse on how the Democrats and Republicans changed their positions on civil rights

What Civil Rights History Can Teach Kavanaugh’s Critics by Blair Kelly in the New York Times

Misc

Pyramid Scheme by Ilana Gershon at Allegra Lab - how organizational structure can facilitate abuse

David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words by Aaron Bady at the New Inquiry  - I have never read Debt but I’ve practically made a hobby of reading critiques and reviews.  I like this one a lot, although the best quote is too long for this linkspam.

Here, have a somewhat meandering but very interesting Twitter thread by Malka Older about charity, stigma and formal systems of aid.

Black Educators Share Their Thoughts on What Happens When White Women Cry in Schools by Kelli Seaton at Philly’s 7th Ward

White Women Aren’t Afraid of Black People. They Want Power. by Stacey Patton at Dame

Foreign Key by Sumana Harihareswara at their personal blog - in which racism causes people to hallucinate accents

Augmenting Long-term Memory by Michael Nielsen at Y Combinator Research - I have started using the tool, Anki, that Nielsen recommends in this post, and have no regrets thus far

How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook

Women’s Anticipation of the Employment Effects of Motherhood: Evidence and Implications by Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

What is it like to be a man? by Phil Christman at Hedgehog Review - reflections on masculinity

Autism from the inside by Katherine May at Aeon

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins in conversation with Sarah McFarland Taylor and Diane Winston - I particularly liked Sarah McFarland Taylor’s section and her discussion of plausibility structures

What It Takes to Be a Trial Lawyer If You’re Not a Man by Lara Bazelon at the Atlantic

Three philosophical schools by siderea at her personal blog

Jacob Levy’s Liberalism of Tragedy by Adam Gurri at Liberal Currents

#linkspam

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“[Socrates] adds that as far as he himself is concerned he believes that “it would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I direct were out of tune and loud with discord, and that most men should not agree with me and contradict me, rather than that I, being one, should be out of tune with myself and contradict myself”.  The key notion in this sentence is “I who am one” which is unfortunately left out in many English translations.  The meaning is clear: even though I am one, I am not simply one, I have a self and I am related to this self as my own self.  This self is by no means an illusion; it makes itself heard by talking to me - I talk to myself, I am not only aware of myself - and in this sense, though I am one, I am two-in-one and there can be harmony or disharmony with the self.  If I disagree with other people, I can walk away; but I cannot walk away from myself, and therefore I better first try to be in agreement with myself before I take all others into consideration. This same sentence also spells out the actual reason it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong: if I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in unbearable intimacy; I can never get rid of him.”

- Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment

#quotes #hannah arendt