Prolific political scientist Steven Brams has been promoting peace and fairness one algorithm at a time.
Much scholarly research never suggests a clear practical application for the public good. You can’t say that about the work of Steven J. Brams, professor of politics at New York University. He seems to have an angle on everything.
True to form, he has advice that could help detoxify national politics and pull the agenda from the grip of political extremists … and a better way to elect candidates in a political primary where there seems to be no clearly superior choice … and how to pick a special congressional committee when important work needs to be done on divisive issues.
Born in Concord, N.H., and educated at MIT and Northwestern, Brams, at 71, is the kind of measured, unflashy communicator — he has a slight New England accent — you would expect to teach a math class.
Yet he is a formidable representative of the “rational choice” or “social choice” professoriate — scholars who apply economic methods to problems once reserved for other disciplines. Some consider rational choice adherents an invasive species, and Brams does seem to represent the “go anywhere” approach.
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Select Out “SelectOut offers to bring control and choice back to users online when it comes to their information used in online tracking and advertising. Learn about the practices of online tracking companies, your options with them, and the current state of online privacy. Make sure to check out the blog for more details.’
In the whole of the Biblical Old Testament, only the Book of Jonah has no reference to the vine or wine. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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One Reason to Pass on the Cat Stew
The sudden and unexpected death of a Chinese billionaire is now being called a murder, after police detained a man they suspect of poisoning his cat-meat stew. The suspect, an agricultural official who had allegedly embezzled money from the tycoon, is believed to have added a poisonous plant to the dish, a local delicacy, when they were dining together after a business meeting. Another member of their lunch party noticed that the stew had tasted unusually bitter, but he did not know the reason why and did not stop his friend from eating it. The restaurant owner was initially suspected of serving bad food, but further investigation revealed that the actual cause of death was more sinister. More …
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Here’s a better alternative to Girl Scouts: American Heritage Girls.
In October, we reported about the Girl Scouts of Colorado’s decision to let a little boy into the organization’s fold. And, on a grander scale, there have been countless accusations of liberal bias waged against the group. Some have felt so passionate about the organization’s alleged leftist allegiances that they have launched alternative groups for families seeking more traditional scouting experiences.
Take, for instance, American Heritage Girls (AHG), which describes itself as, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to the mission of building women of integrity through service to God, family, community and country.” AHG was founded back in 1995 in West Chester, Ohio, by a group of parents who were looking for a Christ-centered alternative to some of the increasingly-secular organizations that had been setup for young girls (i.e. the Girl Scouts).
In searching for a Judeo-Christian alternative, they simply decided to launch their own endeavor that, just 16 years after its founding, has grown into something more massive than they ever imagined.
“We are a Christ-center character development program for girls ages five to 18,” Patti Garibay, executive director of AHG, told the Blaze in an interview.
Garibay, one of the founding members, explained in detail what led her to work with other concerned parents to create the Christian non-profit. When I asked her what spawned the decision, she quipped, “Certainly not spare time.” The mother of four went on to explain that creating AHG was not something that she wanted to do, rather it was something she knew she had to do.
“I just thought that we were creating a little club for my third daughter. I had led my older girls through Girl Scouting,” she explains. “In 1993, when the Girl Scouts allowed for flexibility of the word ‘God,’ I began to have a moral dilemma.”
It was during this year that the Girl Scouts, having trouble attracting individuals who did not necessarily embrace a Judeo-Christian view of God, voted 1,560 to 375 to alter its pledge. While the Scout’s promise would retain its official wording, individuals were allowed to substitute “God” with words they deemed more fitting. While the original reference to a higher power was never definitively said to be Christian in nature, this change was a major milestone in many families’ decision to separate from the group.
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HAPPY NEW YEAR? THINGS THAT WILL BE MORE EXPENSIVE IN 2012
I’ve taken just the first sentence from each. Go to the link for more info.
1. Domestic and International Airfare: Greater demand and fewer available airline seats will likely lead to higher ticket prices for flights next year.
2. New Digital Camera Models: Smartphones have quickly replaced budget friendly point-and-shoot cameras, so manufacturers and retailers are focusing more on higher-end digital SLRs.
3. Hard Drives: There’s been a shortage of hard drives thanks to epic flooding in Thailand in 2011, and some retailers have actually been rationing hard drive–based products.
4. Desktop Computers: The consolidation of desktop features into monitor-integrated units — many with touchscreens — will drive desktop prices up in 2012
5. Food for Home Preparation: If your grocery bill seemed higher in 2011, you weren’t imagining things. Most retailers have reported that food prices are rising and those increases are being passed along to shoppers.
6. Mobile Device Data Plans: Data plans in the past have had a tendency to decline, but as carriers build out 4G services, and move away from unlimited plans, data is set to become more expensive in 2012
7. City-Enforced Fees: As municipalities look for ways to make up for budget shortfalls, fees for everything from dog licenses to vehicle registration and parking rates are going up, as is enforcement of fine-related infractions.
8. Water: Most communities in the United States will face water rate hikes this year, even places that are rich with the natural resource.
9. Gas: Fuel prices began inching up just before the holidays,
10. Gold: The precious metal is poised to achieve its 11th straight year of growth.
11. Shipping: Unfortunately for avid online shoppers, the U.S. Postal Service will raise rates by an average of 4.6% next year.
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Obama defies lawmakers with recess appointments to NLRB
by Kevin Bogardus – The Hill
President Obama will recess-appoint his nominees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), bypassing a likely filibuster from Senate Republicans to keep the controversial agency operating in 2012.
The president will use recess appointments to install Sharon Block, Richard Griffin and Terence Flynn as NLRB members. Block and Griffin are Democrats, while Flynn is a Republican.
“The American people deserve to have qualified public servants fighting for them every day — whether it is to enforce new consumer protections or uphold the rights of working Americans,” Obama said in a statement. “We can’t wait to act to strengthen the economy and restore security for our middle class and those trying to get in it, and that’s why I am proud to appoint these fine individuals to get to work for the American people.”
The NLRB announcement came a few hours after the president made a public show of another recess appointment, for Richard Cordray, the new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans reacted with fury to that appointment, which the White House promptly ignored by making three more.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blasted the president’s decision and said he is stripping the Senate of its oversight powers, since the NLRB nominees had not been vetted in a hearing.
“What the President did today sets a terrible precedent that could allow any future President to completely cut the Senate out of the confirmation process, appointing his nominees immediately after sending their names up to Congress,” McConnell said in a statement.
The NLRB appointments are a huge victory for Obama’s union allies, which urged the president to use any means necessary to keep the NLRB functioning. Without additional members, the NLRB would have lacked the three-member quorum needed to issue rules and regulations.
Read the article here.
In case you had any lingering doubts that 2012 was truly humanity’s last year on Earth, I believe the $23 “Social Shower Curtain” from Spinning Hat should be able to offer a sufficient response.
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The 18-year-old mother of a 3-month-old boy shot and killed a home invader after being told by a 911 dispatcher to “do what you have to do to protect your baby.”
Sarah McKinley of Blanchard, Oklahoma, called 911 after 24-year-old Justin Shane Martin broke into her mobile home. She told the dispatcher she had two guns in her hand, and asked for permission to shoot the intruder if he approached her.
“Well, you have to do whatever you can do to protect yourself,” said a Grady County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher according to just-released tapes of their conversation. “I can’t tell you that you can do that, but you have to do what you have to do to protect your baby.”
McKinley, who lost her husband to lung cancer on Christmas Day, eventually fired at Martin with a 12-gauge shotgun, who was reportedly holding a knife at the time.
No charges will be filed against McKinley, as authorities say she was acting in self-defense. Instead, prosecutors are charging Dustin Louis Stewart, Martin’s alleged accomplice, with first-degree murder.
“When you’re engaged in a crime such as first-degree burglary and a death results from the events of that crime, you’re subject to prosecution for it,” said attorney James Walters.
A 36-year-old woman attempting to add a touch of postmodernism to Clyfford Still’s abstract expressionist artwork is said to have caused $10,000 worth of damage to “1957-J no.2” (above) after she scratched and punched the oil-on-canvas painting, and rubbed it on her butt.
According to Denver District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman, Carmen Tisch urinated after soiling the piece with her backside, but “[i]t doesn’t appear she urinated on the painting or that the urine damaged it.” The 9-1/2-feet tall and 13-feet wide painting is valued at $30 million.
Tisch, who was arrested and charged with felony criminal mischief, is currently being held on $20,000 bond.
Artwork by Still, an influential post-WW2-era artist, is on display at his namesake museum, which recently opened in Denver. Many of the pieces were recently unveiled for the first time.
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Construction Begins on California’s Golden Gate Bridge (Today in 1933)
For 27 years after its completion in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge had the longest main span in the world, stretching 4,200 ft (1,280 m). Its four-year construction, supervised by chief engineer Joseph B. Strauss, faced many difficulties, including rapidly running tides, frequent storms and fogs, and the problem of blasting rock under deep water to plant earthquake-resistant foundations. Considered a modern wonder, the bridge spans the Golden Gate, a strait that links what two bodies of water? More…
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Soldiers could one day conduct covert operations in complete secrecy, now that Pentagon-backed physicists have figured out how to mask entire events by distorting light.
A team at Cornell University, with support from Darpa, the Pentagon’s out-there research arm, managed to hide an event for 40 picoseconds (those are trillionths of seconds, if you’re counting). They’ve published their groundbreaking research in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.
This is the first time that scientists have succeeded in masking an event, though research teams have in recent years made remarkable strides in cloaking objects. Researchers at the University of Texas, Dallas, last year harnessed the mirage effect to make objects vanish. And in 2010, physicists at the University of St. Andrews made leaps towards using metamaterials to trick human eyes into not seeing what was right in front of them.
Masking an object entails bending light around that object. If the light doesn’t actually hit an object, then that object won’t be visible to the human eye.
MORE.
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In an edited excerpt from his new book, Too Big to Know, David Weinberger explains how the massive amounts of data necessary to deal with complex phenomena exceed any single brain’s ability to grasp, yet networked science rolls on.
The Atlantic Home
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
David Weinberger – David Weinberger is a senior researcher at Havard’s Berkman Center. He is the author of several books including his latest, Too Big to Know.
In an edited excerpt from his new book, Too Big to Know, David Weinberger explains how the massive amounts of data necessary to deal with complex phenomena exceed any single brain’s ability to grasp, yet networked science rolls on.
Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recorded daily weather observations, but they didn’t record them hourly or by the minute. Not only did they have other things to do, such data didn’t seem useful. Even after the invention of the telegraph enabled the centralization of weather data, the 150 volunteers who received weather instruments from the Smithsonian Institution in 1849 still reported only once a day. Now there is a literally immeasurable, continuous stream of climate data from satellites circling the earth, buoys bobbing in the ocean, and Wi-Fi-enabled sensors in the rain forest. We are measuring temperatures, rainfall, wind speeds, C02 levels, and pressure pulses of solar wind. All this data and much, much more became worth recording once we could record it, once we could process it with computers, and once we could connect the data streams and the data processors with a network.
How will we ever make sense of scientific topics that are too big to know? The short answer: by transforming what it means to know something scientifically.
This would not be the first time. For example, when Sir Francis Bacon said that knowledge of the world should be grounded in carefully verified facts about the world, he wasn’t just giving us a new method to achieve old-fashioned knowledge. He was redefining knowledge as theories that are grounded in facts. The Age of the Net is bringing about a redefinition at the same scale. Scientific knowledge is taking on properties of its new medium, becoming like the network in which it lives.
MORE.
When the Borgata casino first opened in Atlantic City the poker room was the talk of the East Coast. It was huge; it was elegant and comfortable; it promised major action at all stakes. It was the closest thing to the Bellagio you’d find anywhere outside of Las Vegas. Those early days at the Borgata were exciting. The poker rooms of NYC, the Taj, Foxwoods, Turning Stone, and all the VFW halls up and down I-95 seemed to have emptied out. Every degenerate gambler on the East Coast was in Atlantic City that summer, and it often seemed like most of them were in the Borgata poker room.
The Borgata poker room had a giant digital board on the wall that displayed and updated the betting lines of the day’s games. I’m not sure what it’s stated purpose was; sports betting was still illegal in New Jersey, as it was in every state other than Nevada, Delaware, Oregon, and Montana. But lots of things that happen in Atlantic City aren’t technically legal, and sometimes these things are advertised, or implied, by a giant digital board. One night in 2005 the people in the poker game I was in started debating the line on the Lakers game that was about to tip off on the screens all over the poker room. One guy asked if anyone wanted to “get down on it at three and a half.” Soon everyone at the table was shouting out their bets to the guy. He waved over a guy in an Ed Hardy shirt who was hanging out in the high limit room near the “big game,” which on that night was $300-600 game. He whispered in Ed Hardy’s ear, the guy ran back to the big game, and we were all told that we had a bet.
After the Laker game wrapped up the losers and winners settled up with the guy in chips, chips that he handed over to the guy from the high-limit room, who then went to the window to cash in. It was incredible. All over the Borgata poker room there was a full-service sports book that let you bet in credit from the comfort of your chair. Las Vegas didn’t have shit on this outfit. In Vegas they actually expect you to give them the money before you had a bet!
MOTR.
The Nazca Lines are gigantic geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert, a high arid plateau that stretches 53 miles between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana in Peru. They were created by the Nazca culture between 200 BC and 600 AD. There are hundreds of individual figures, ranging in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, and lizards. The Nazca lines cannot be recognized as coherent figures except from the air. Since it is presumed the Nazca people could never have seen their work from this vantage point, there has been much speculation on the builders’ abilities and motivations.
The conquistador chronicler Pedro de Cieza de Leon first mentioned some of the figures in 1547. He described the few glyphs drawn on hillsides whose shape can be seen without an aircraft.
The lines were first noticed in the modern era when airplanes began flying over the Peruvian desert in the 1920s. In 1927, Toribio Mejia Xespe, a Peruvian doctor and anthropologist was the first scientist to show interest in what he called these”great Incan ceremonial artifacts”.
MORE.
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Krapina is a town in northern Croatia and the administrative centre of Krapina-Zagorje county with a population of 4,647 (2001) and a total municipality population of 12,950 (2001). Krapina is located in the hilly Zagorje region of Croatia, approximately 55 km away from both Zagreb and Varaždin.
Krapina Neanderthals
The Zagorje region has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic Age. Krapina is famous for an archaeological discovery in 1899, where a population of Neanderthals was discovered by geologist, archaeologist and paleontologist Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger. The archaeological discovery on a hill called Hušnjak unearth over eight hundred fossil remains depicting over almost 75 Neanderthals individuals, along with tools and weapons, making the site one of the most significant in Europe. Studies of these Neanderthals fossil shows that they died between the age of sixteen and twenty four.
more.
Among the 80 or so customers crammed into Bare Escentuals, it’s easy to spot Leslie Blodgett. It’s not merely her six-inch platform heels and bright magenta-and-blue dress that set her apart in the Thousand Oaks (Calif.) mall boutique, but her confidence. To the woman concerned she’s too old for shimmery eye shadow, Blodgett swoops in and encourages her to wear whatever she wants. With a deft sweep of a brush, she demonstrates a new shade of blush on another customer’s cheek. And when she isn’t helping anyone, she pivots on her heels for admirers gushing about her dress, made by the breakout designer Erdem.
MORE.
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Top 3 Oral Histories of 2011
This felt like the year of the oral history. Where once you could only expect one or two l in a given year, seemingly every week brought some bit of cultural detritus being remembered and misremembered by its principals. The Complete Oral History of Party Down (Details): Watch the series on Netflix Instant (before it’s gone!), then get some nice backstory on the creation and casting of the show.
Blow-Up: An Oral History of Michael Bay, the Most Explosive Director of All Time (GQ): Actually made me appreciate the signature spectacle of Mr. Bay.
The Greatest Paper That Ever Died (Grantland): You knew it was coming given Grantland editor-in-chief’s Bill Simmons’ limited set of obsessions, but extremely well done and didn’t disappoint.
Top 3 Food Longreads of 2011
A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib As Arbitrage (The Awl): Provocative deconstruction of the McRib’s cult sandwich status that successfully ropes in a critique of our industrialized food supply.
Danny Meyer Is On a Roll (New York Times Magazine): Features the most bravura set piece opening I read this year, and then steadily evolves into a deft takedown, depicting Meyer’s abandonment of the stay-small philosophy that guided him for 25 years so he can chase the grease-stained lucre that comes with a global high-end burger chain.
Diner for Schmucks (GQ): Longtime food critic Alan Richman lays out a bizarre story of his reviewing experience of the culinary shooting star M. Wells, a haute diner in New York’s Long Island City that was the “it” restaurant for a hot minute and seemingly wilted a bit under the pressure.
Originally posted 2012-01-05 13:39:58. Republished by Blog Post Promoter