i'ma have to follow the "donald's" utterances more closely...,

 

thehill |  Real estate tycoon Donald Trump cast doubt Monday on whether Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) can run for president, because Cruz was born in Canada.

"It’s a hurdle; somebody could certainly look at it very seriously," Trump said during a phone interview Monday on My Fox New York.

"He was born in Canada. If you know and when we all studied our history lessons, you are supposed to be born in this country, so I just don't know how the courts will rule on this."

Trump, who says he is exploring a bid for president in 2016, was part of the "birther" movement that questioned President Obama's birth place, as well as the veracity of his birth certificate. He recently took credit for getting Obama to release his birth certificate while speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

After flirting with a 2012 presidential bid, Trump has announced an exploratory committee for 2016 and says he will not renew his contract for his TV show, "The Apprentice" on NBC.  

Cruz confirmed his bid for president on Monday morning during a speech at Liberty University.

“It’s going to take a new generation of courageous conservatives to help make America great again, and I’m ready to stand with you to lead the fight," he said in a video touting the speech.

cheating and incompetent overseers messed up the simple task of confirming gang affiliation...,

NYTimes |  In Stanislaus County, as in many counties in California and across the United States, law-enforcement officers keep a database of individuals that they have identified as gang members. From their point of view, these lists are vital and necessary, but activists argue that they can be discriminatory. Researchers have found that white gang membership tends to be underestimated and undercounted, while the opposite is true for black and Latino youth. In 1997, California created a statewide database, called CalGang, and by 2012, according to documents obtained by the Youth Justice Coalition, there were more than 200,000 individuals named in it (roughly the same number as the population of Modesto), including some as young as 10. Statewide, 66 percent were Latino, and one in 10 of all African-Americans in Los Angeles County between the ages of 20 and 24 were on the list.

When the STEP Act became law, there were dissenting voices, some of them unsurprising, like the American Civil Liberties Union. But there were others you might not expect: Among law-enforcement authorities, for example, there were concerns that the STEP Act could be applied too broadly. Wes McBride, a retired sergeant of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the executive director of the California Gang Investigators Association, told me that although he has come to see the law as valuable, he was initially skeptical. “We thought the original writing of that bill was bad,” he said. “It made being a gang member a crime, and that flies in the face of the Constitution, in my mind. What’s to stop the Boy Scouts from being considered a gang?” Shortly after the STEP Act went into effect, The Los Angeles Times quoted an anonymous law-enforcement official expressing concern: “I realize that we have to do something, but when you have carte blanche, it’s difficult not to abuse it.”

A quarter of a century later, this point is still being raised. Manohar Raju, a lawyer who manages the felony unit at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, told me he has seen prosecutors’ use of gang enhancements go up in recent years. Young men and women are bundled into the broad category of “gang member” all the time, based on photos like the ones shown at Sebourn’s trial; based on their wearing this color or that one; based, essentially, on a misunderstanding of how difficult these neighborhoods really are for youth. “Posing in a picture, acting cool or acting tough can be a navigation strategy,” Raju said. “That may not mean they want problems; in fact, it may mean the opposite.”

According to Raju, weak cases can seem stronger when prosecutors introduce gang enhancements. Instead of concrete evidence related to the criminal charge, gang allegations permit prosecutors to introduce potentially inflammatory information that might otherwise be legally irrelevant. “Now we’re looking at: what did some other person do six months earlier or six years earlier,” Raju said. “Your client may not have anything to do with them, but they both have some connection to some name or symbol.” In other cases, the very threat of the gang enhancement can often be enough to persuade a defendant to accept a plea bargain. Given the lengthy sentences that can result, a trial might not be worth the risk.

Roughly 7 percent of California’s prison population, around 115,000 people, is serving extra time because of gang enhancements; given that the state has been ordered by the Supreme Court to reduce its prison overcrowding, this is hardly an insignificant figure. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, nearly half of those convicted with gang enhancements are serving an additional 10 years or more. Black and Latino inmates account for more than 90 percent of inmates with gang enhancements; fewer than 3 percent are white.

b'more overseers murdered freddie gray and started the rioting with schoolkids...,

#praying4Baltimore #mondawminmall

A video posted by BE-Z Clothing Comp (@mrbez4ever) on Apr 27, 2015 at 12:10pm PDT

motherjones |  Meg Gibson, another Baltimore teacher, described a similar scene to Gawker: "The riot police were already at the bus stop on the other side of the mall, turning buses that transport the students away, not allowing students to board. They were waiting for the kids.…Those kids were set up, they were treated like criminals before the first brick was thrown." With police unloading busses, and with the nearby metro station shut down, there were few ways for students to clear out.

Several eyewitnesses in the area that afternoon say that police seemed to arrive at Mondawmin anticipating mobs and violence—prior to any looting. At 3:01 p.m., the Baltimore Police Department posted on its Facebook page: "There is a group of juveniles in the area of Mondawmin Mall. Expect traffic delays in the area." But many of the kids, according to eyewitnesses, were stuck there because of police actions.

The Baltimore Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Around 3:30, the police reported that juveniles had begun to throw bottles and bricks. Fifteen minutes later, the police department noted that one of its officers had been injured. After that the violence escalated, and rioters started looting the Mondawmin Mall, and Baltimore was in for a long night of trouble and violence. But as the event is reviewed and investigated, an important question warrants attention: What might have happened had the police not prevented students from leaving the area? 

Did the department's own actions increase the chances of conflict?

As Meghann Harris put it, "if I were a Douglas student that just got trapped in the middle of a minefield BY cops without any way to get home and completely in harm's way, I'd be ready to pop off, too."

On social media, eyewitnesses chronicled the dramatic police presence before the rioting began:

On Twitter, Baltimore residents vented their frustration with the situation.

intro to yemen for young hung wen ting...,

theatlantic |  In Safa al-Ahmad’s new documentary on the pitched battle for Yemen, which aired this week on Frontline, the Saudi Arabian filmmaker passes by countless posters declaring—and a number of schoolchildren gleefully chanting—a set of lines that may sound familiar to Americans who lived through the Iran hostage crisis:

God is great
Death to America
Death to Israel
God curse the Jews
Victory to Islam

The chilling slogan belongs to the Houthis, the enigmatic rebel group that has taken over the Yemeni capital Sanaa and other parts of the country, and ousted Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his government. But the echoes of Iran's revolutionary "Death to America" chant don't necessarily mean, as many have suggested, that the Houthis are a proxy force for Shia-led Iran in its battle with Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen and has now launched air strikes against the Houthis.

The multi-front fight for Yemen—which involves numerous other factions including al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and supporters of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh—is far more complicated than a straightforward sectarian proxy war, Ahmad says.

storm clouds approaching...

Oilprice.com | Oil companies continue to get burned by low oil prices, but the pain is bleeding over into the financial industry. Major banks are suffering huge losses from both directly backing some struggling oil companies, but also from buying high-yield debt that is now going sour.

The Wall Street Journal reported that tens of millions of dollars have gone up in smoke on loans made to the energy industry by Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and UBS. Loans issued to oil and gas companies have looked increasingly unappetizing, making it difficult for the banks to sell them on the market.

To make matters worse, much of the credit issued by the big banks have been tied to oil field services firms, rather than drillers themselves – companies that provide equipment, housing, well completions, trucks, and much more. These companies sprung up during the boom, but they are the first to feel the pain when drilling activity cuts back. With those firms running out of cash to pay back lenders, Wall Street is having a lot of trouble getting rid of its pile of bad loans.

Robert Cohen, a loan-portfolio manager at DoubleLine Capital, told the Wall Street Journal that he declined to purchase energy loans from Citibank. “We’ve been pretty shy about dipping back into the energy names,” he said. “We’re taking a wait-and-see attitude.”

But some big investors jumped back into the high-yield debt markets in February as it appeared that oil prices stabilized and were even rebounding. However, since March 4 when oil prices began to fall again, an estimated $7 billion in high-yield debt from distressed energy companies was wiped out, according to Bloomberg.

The high-yield debt market is being overrun by the energy industry. High-yield energy debt has swelled from just $65.6 billion in 2007 up to $201 billion today. That is a result of shaky drillers turning to debt markets more and more to stay afloat, as well as once-stable companies getting downgraded into junk territory. Yields on junk energy debt have hit 7.44 percent over government bonds, more than double the rate from June 2014.

well-intended thought-leaders and diversity window-dressers need to read some kahneman...,

NYTimes |  Scrawled on Starbucks cups, the words “Race Together” were intended to stimulate conversations about race relations in America, beginning just days before the company’s annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday. But the coffee company’s campaign has instead unleashed widespread vitriol and derision.

The company effort, which began this week, lit up social media, drawing criticism and skepticism. The attacks grew so hostile that Corey duBrowa, the senior vice president for global communications at Starbucks, temporarily deleted his Twitter account on Monday. “Last night I felt personally attacked in a cascade of negativity,” Mr. duBrowa wrote in a post on Medium on Tuesday.

The fury and confusion boiled down to a simple question: What was Starbucks thinking?

Reactions have ranged from video parodies of customer interactions with baristas to some hostile online attacks aimed at corporate executives. Many have pointed out that the company’s leadership is predominantly white, while many of its baristas are members of minorities.

Others pleaded for a more traditional relationship with the businesses they patronize.

Gwen Ifill, the co-anchor of “PBS NewsHour,” wrote in a tweet on Tuesday: “Honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before I’ve had my morning coffee, it will not end well.”

At the Wednesday gathering in Seattle, Howard D. Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, addressed the nascent public relations campaign accompanied by the stagecraft of African-American guest speakers like the Academy Award winner Common and ending with Jennifer Hudson’s rousing rendition of “Hallelujah” at the close of the presentation.

“Race is an unorthodox and even uncomfortable topic for an annual meeting,” he acknowledged. “Where others see costs, risks, excuses and hopelessness, we see and create pathways of opportunity — that is the role and responsibility of a for-profit, public company.”  Fist tap Arnach (for instigating me to read Thinking Fast and Slow)

what would charles koch do?

HuffPo |  Charles Koch, the billionaire chairman and CEO of Koch Industries and leading conservative mega-donor, has set his sights on a new goal: reforming America's criminal justice system. 

In an interview with The Wichita Eagle published Saturday, Koch said his own experiences in courts -- including the time a federal grand jury indicted Koch Industries on 97 counts of environmental crimes in 2000 -- prompted him to study the justice system at both the state and federal level. In that particular case, centered on a Koch Petroleum Group refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, prosecutors eventually dropped all but one of the charges after the corporation agreed to pay a settlement.

According to Koch's chief counsel Mark Holden, the case made the billionaire industrialist wonder "how the little guy who doesn't have Koch’s resources deals with prosecutions like that," the Eagle reports.

Koch and his brother David have gained notoriety as the bankrollers of Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy group that backs candidates who favor slashing taxes and shrinking government. But the brothers have also quietly backed criminal justice reform for years, and sponsored a forum on the issue earlier this year. Charles Koch said he plans to ramp up his reform efforts in 2015.

"Over the next year, we are going to be pushing the issues key to this, which need a lot of work in this country," Koch told the Eagle. "And that would be freedom of speech, cronyism and how that relates to opportunities for the disadvantaged."

the ecology of religious beliefs

pnas |  Here we show that the spatial prevalence of human societies that believe in moralizing high gods can be predicted with a high level of accuracy (91%) from historical, social, and ecological data. Using high-resolution datasets, we systematically estimate the relative effects of resource abundance, ecological risk, cultural diffusion, shared ancestry, and political complexity on the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high gods. The methods presented in this paper provide a blueprint for how to leverage the increasing wealth of ecological, linguistic, and historical data to understand the forces that have shaped the behavior of our own species. 

Although ecological forces are known to shape the expression of sociality across a broad range of biological taxa, their role in shaping human behavior is currently disputed. Both comparative and experimental evidence indicate that beliefs in moralizing high gods promote cooperation among humans, a behavioral attribute known to correlate with environmental harshness in nonhuman animals. Here we combine fine-grained bioclimatic data with the latest statistical tools from ecology and the social sciences to evaluate the potential effects of environmental forces, language history, and culture on the global distribution of belief in moralizing high gods (n = 583 societies). After simultaneously accounting for potential nonindependence among societies because of shared ancestry and cultural diffusion, we find that these beliefs are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological duress. In addition, we find that these beliefs are more likely in politically complex societies that recognize rights to movable property. Overall, our multimodel inference approach predicts the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high gods with an accuracy of 91%, and estimates the relative importance of different potential mechanisms by which this spatial pattern may have arisen. The emerging picture is neither one of pure cultural transmission nor of simple ecological determinism, but rather a complex mixture of social, cultural, and environmental influences. Our methods and findings provide a blueprint for how the increasing wealth of ecological, linguistic, and historical data can be leveraged to understand the forces that have shaped the behavior of our own species.

why would omidyar sponsor journalism probing global capitalism?

rall |  Just over one year ago, billionaire eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar issued one of the most dramatic announcements America’s beleaguered journalists had experienced in their lifetimes. After decades of closing newspapers, shrinking newsrooms, vanishing foreign bureaus and the near extinction of investigative reporting due to brutal, relentless budget-cutting, Omidyar would endow a new company, First Look Media, with a staggeringly large sum of cash – $250 million – to be deployed in the service of a breathtakingly ambitious attempt to reinvent advocacy journalism in everything from investigations of financial corruption to sports coverage.

Even better, from the standpoint of progressives living in the political wilderness since the rise and fall of George McGovern, First Look Media would be edited by leftist pundits and advocacy journalists like the legal columnist Glenn Greenwald, to whom former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked more than a million classified US government documents, the documentarian Laura Poitras, also involved intimately in the Snowdon saga, and the respected anti-militarism critic Jeremy Scahill.

As some cynics opined, it all sounded too good to be true. (Disclosure: for just shy of a month earlier this year, I worked for Pando Daily.) Why would a billionaire like Omidyar bankroll a bunch of antiestablishment types like the financial reporter Matt Taibbi – hired away from Rolling Stone – whose mission in life is in large part to undermine global capitalism?

Although it’s too soon to declare First Look dead and gone, and Omidyar claims to be as committed to his utopian company as ever, things have gone from bad to worse over the last year. Omidyar’s $250 million pledge shrunk to $50 million. The mission to fund hard-hitting journalism and commentary was recast as, among other things, possibly a “platform” expected to generate significant revenue. Tales of shrinking budgets, diminished expectations, shrinking ambitions and staffers leaving after complaining of managerial incompetence appeared with increasing frequency in the trade press.

covering up for the a-hole md who didn't check the nurse's notes and put presbyterian's bottom line over patient-zero's well-being...,

newsmax |  Dallas doctors apparently never saw a nurse's note that an emergency room patient with fever and pains had recently been in Africa, and he was released into the community while infected with deadly Ebola.

It remains unclear why, despite the hospital's attempt at an explanation Friday. Early in the day, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital said in a statement that a nurse's notes on the infected patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, were contained in records that a physician wouldn't see. Friday night, a spokesman for the institution said that wasn't so.

"We would like to clarify a point made in the statement released earlier," Wendell Watson, a spokesman for the hospital, wrote in an e-mail. "As a standard part of the nursing process, the patient's travel history was documented and available to the full care team in the electronic health record (EHR), including within the physician's workflow."

There "was no flaw in the EHR in the way the physician and nursing portions interacted related to this event," Watson said.

The changing message came after the hospital faced criticism from other medical professionals about the actions taken prior to the patient's release. Ashish Jha, a health policy professor at Harvard University's School of Public Health in Boston, said no matter what, the doctor responsible should have double-checked the man's travel history before he was sent back out into the community.

‘Logic Flaws' 

"There are so many flaws in the logic of ‘The EMR system made us to do it,'" Jha said in a telephone interview Friday, referring to the hospital's initial statement. "When a patient walks in the ER with a fever, the standard question is ‘Have you traveled?' I don't understand why that question wasn't asked by the physician."

Two days after being released, Duncan returned in an ambulance to the Dallas hospital, was placed in isolation and subsequently confirmed as having the deadly disease.

Wendell Watson, a spokesman for the hospital, said earlier Friday that the hospital had wrongly designed its digital record system so not all of a nurse's notes are visible to doctors. Its not clear from the clarification sent to media just before midnight what actually happened.

how do you get away with telling the state education superintendent to go stuff it?

markmaynard |  On Thursday, February 20, at 10:00 AM, members of the Eastern Michigan University (EMU) community opposed to the ongoing association between their university and the Snyder administration’s troubled Educational Achievement Authority (EAA), will be gathering in Welch Hall to “demand” that all connections be immediately severed. Following is my discussion with EMU College of Education Associate Professor Steven Camron, one of the event’s organizers… Those who cannot attend, by the way, are encouraged to sign the online petition.

MARK: My knowledge of the Educational Achievement Authority (EAA) is somewhat limited. Perhaps a good way for us to start would be for me to tell you what little I know, and you can jump in and correct me where necessary… As I understand it, the EAA was conceived of as a statewide school district, into which Michigan’s least well performing schools could be placed. This, we were told by the Governor, when he announced the existence of the EAA in 2011, would make it easier for the State to ensure that “more and better resources” could be delivered to the students in these schools. The long term goal, we were told, was to put the bottom 5% of all Michigan schools into the EAA, but they started with a subset of 15 Detroit schools. And the results at these schools, from what I’ve been able to ascertain, have been mixed at best. Since the roll-out of the EAA, during the 2012-2013 school year, we’ve seen enrollment in these schools drop by 24%, insufficient funding, and evidence of unsafe conditions, among other things. In other words, it doesn’t look as though “more and better resources” actually materialized… Am I close?

STEVEN: Yes, you’re spot-on! Former teachers I’ve talked to (three to be precise) have confirmed the anonymous reports we’ve been hearing out of EAA schools, about the poor teaching and learning environments. For instance, even experienced teachers are finding the exclusive teaching methodology – the computer-centric BUZZ system – wildly insufficient and under-resourced. And that’s even more true for the untrained Teach for America recruits who have been drafted to work in these schools.

MARK: Snyder, when announcing the launch of this initiative, in addition to promising “more and better resources” for kids in EAA schools, also said that there would be “more autonomy in these schools.” Given your reference to an “exclusive teaching methodology,” would I be right to assume that he also never made good on the promise of autonomy?

STEVEN: When the corporate reformers talk about “more autonomy for the schools” they don’t mean autonomy for teachers in the classroom. They mean principals getting to make hiring and firing decisions. They mean autonomy from “central office” on curriculum decisions, working conditions, staffing, etc.

MARK: What can you tell me about the BUZZ system?

STEVEN: I do not have first-hand knowledge of BUZZ. I’d suggest that you talk to former teachers, Delbery Glaze or Brooke Harris, who have very strong feelings and experience with it, and have described it as a joke.

MARK: Based on what we’re seeing unfold, it’s difficult not to get the impression that our legislators want to see a system in which those with resources purchase private education, while those without are warehoused in situations where inexperienced facilitators essentially read scripts… Which leads me to my next question. Are any of these initiatives being put forward by the EAA scientifically vetted? Are they employing best practices sanctioned by the educational community?

STEVEN: I think EAA officials have described their instructional approaches as “Student-Centered-Learning,” “cutting-edge” and the wave of the future. If that were true then why did the Kansas City Public Schools dump that experimental approach immediately after Covington left them to come to the EAA. Former teachers, and some anonymous current EAA teachers have unanimously described the instructional regimen at the EAA as anything but student-centered. My colleagues in the College of Education at Eastern, and Dr. Tom Pedroni from Wayne State, know better than I about evidence-based, research-supported pedagogy, and they describe this approach as defective from the beginning.

stranded by sprawl...,

NYTimes | Detroit is a symbol of the old economy’s decline. It’s not just the derelict center; the metropolitan area as a whole lost population between 2000 and 2010, the worst performance among major cities. 

Atlanta, by contrast, epitomizes the rise of the Sun Belt; it gained more than a million people over the same period, roughly matching the performance of Dallas and Houston without the extra boost from oil.

Yet in one important respect booming Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying, where the children of the poor have great difficulty climbing the economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility — the extent to which children manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents — is even lower in Atlanta than it is in Detroit. And it’s far lower in both cities than it is in, say, Boston or San Francisco, even though these cities have much slower growth than Atlanta. 

So what’s the matter with Atlanta? A new study suggests that the city may just be too spread out, so that job opportunities are literally out of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods. Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger. 

The new study comes from the Equality of Opportunity Project, which is led by economists at Harvard and Berkeley. There have been many comparisons of social mobility across countries; all such studies find that these days America, which still thinks of itself as the land of opportunity, actually has more of an inherited class system than other advanced nations. The new project asks how social mobility varies across U.S. cities, and finds that it varies a lot. In San Francisco a child born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution has an 11 percent chance of making it into the top fifth, but in Atlanta the corresponding number is only 4 percent. 

When the researchers looked for factors that correlate with low or high social mobility, they found, perhaps surprisingly, little direct role for race, one obvious candidate. They did find a significant correlation with the existing level of inequality: “areas with a smaller middle class had lower rates of upward mobility.” This matches what we find in international comparisons, where relatively equal societies like Sweden have much higher mobility than highly unequal America. But they also found a significant negative correlation between residential segregation — different social classes living far apart — and the ability of the poor to rise. 

And in Atlanta poor and rich neighborhoods are far apart because, basically, everything is far apart; Atlanta is the Sultan of Sprawl, even more spread out than other major Sun Belt cities. This would make an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t. As a result, disadvantaged workers often find themselves stranded; there may be jobs available somewhere, but they literally can’t get there. 

The apparent inverse relationship between sprawl and social mobility obviously reinforces the case for “smart growth” urban strategies, which try to promote compact centers with access to public transit. But it also bears on a larger debate about what is happening to American society. I know I’m not the only person who read the Times article on the new study and immediately thought, “William Julius Wilson.” 

A quarter-century ago Mr. Wilson, a distinguished sociologist, famously argued that the postwar movement of employment out of city centers to the suburbs dealt African-American families, concentrated in those city centers, a heavy blow, removing economic opportunity just as the civil rights movement was finally ending explicit discrimination. And he further argued that social phenomena such as the prevalence of single mothers, often cited as causes of lagging black performance, were actually effects — that is, the family was being undermined by the absence of good jobs.

technology is destroying jobs (psst.., and there's no plan for supporting/sustaining unprofitable consumers)

technologyreview | Given his calm and reasoned academic demeanor, it is easy to miss just how provocative Erik Brynjolfsson’s contention really is. ­Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.

That robots, automation, and software can replace people might seem obvious to anyone who’s worked in automotive manufacturing or as a travel agent. But Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s claim is more troubling and controversial. They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other technologically advanced countries.

Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence, according to Brynjolfsson, is a chart that only an economist could love. In economics, productivity—the amount of economic value created for a given unit of input, such as an hour of labor—is a crucial indicator of growth and wealth creation. It is a measure of progress. On the chart Brynjolfsson likes to show, separate lines represent productivity and total employment in the United States. For years after World War II, the two lines closely tracked each other, with increases in jobs corresponding to increases in productivity. The pattern is clear: as businesses generated more value from their workers, the country as a whole became richer, which fueled more economic activity and created even more jobs. Then, beginning in 2000, the lines diverge; productivity continues to rise robustly, but employment suddenly wilts. By 2011, a significant gap appears between the two lines, showing economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation. Brynjolfsson and McAfee call it the “great decoupling.” And Brynjolfsson says he is confident that technology is behind both the healthy growth in productivity and the weak growth in jobs.

book reviews: the trouble with neuroscience

newscientist | NO CREVICE of the human experience is safe. Our deepest fears and desires, our pasts and our futures – all have been revealed, and all in the form of colourful images that look like lava bubbling under the skull. 

That, at least, is the popular conception of neuroscience – and it's worth big money. The US and the European Union are throwing billions of dollars at two new projects to map the human brain. Yet there is also a growing anxiety that many of neuroscience's findings don't stand up to scrutiny. It's not just sensational headlines reporting a "dark patch" in a psychopath's brain, there are now serious concerns that some of the methods themselves are flawed.

The intrepid outsider needs expert guidance through this rocky terrain – and there's no better place to start than Brainwashed by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld. Satel, a practising psychiatrist, and Lilienfeld, a clinical psychologist, are terrific sherpas. They are clear-sighted, considered and forgiving of the novice's ignorance.

Their first stop is the fMRI scan – a staple of much brain research. Worryingly, the statistical techniques used to construct the images sometimes create a mirage of activity where none should exist. They have a telling example: one research team watching a salmon in an fMRI scanner as images of human faces were flashed at it saw its brain spark into life in certain shots – even though it was dead.

Such fishy results are troubling enough, but even legitimate scans can be problematic. As the authors point out, brain images should be used only alongside other kinds of evidence. But all too often they are given the final say on human behaviour. A common pitfall, assert Satel and Lilienfeld, is "neurodeterminism" – the idea that a murderer, say, had been cursed with a brain defect that destroyed their sense of morality.

book review: philosophical foundations of neuroscience

notredame | Neuroscience is the study of the physiological mechanisms that give rise to a manifold of human capacities, including perception, memory, vision and the emotions. To achieve the goals of scientific understanding, neuroscientists must of necessity advance claims and hypotheses which are subjected to scientific experiment. In addition to experimental techniques, neuroscientists need a conceptual framework within which to make sense of the results of their empirical work. In short, a necessary complement to empirical research is a coherent conception of the phenomena under investigation, that is, human psychological capacities.

Bennett - a distinguished neuroscientist - and Hacker - the preeminent scholar of Wittgenstein's thought - have teamed up to produce a withering attack on the conception of the mental that lies at the heart of contemporary neuroscience. Although neuroscientists are committed materialists, and adamantly insist on this aspect of their anti-Cartesianism, they have, Bennett and Hacker argue, merely jettisoned the dual substance doctrine of Cartesianism, but retained its faulty structure with respect to the relation of mind and behavior.

for lots of people, off-the-books work is the only work available...,

newyorker | hen we all finished filing our tax returns last week, there was a little something missing: two trillion dollars. That’s how much money Americans may have made in the past year that didn’t get reported to the I.R.S., according to a recent study by the economist Edgar Feige, who’s been investigating the so-called underground, or gray, economy for thirty-five years. It’s a huge number: if the government managed to collect taxes on all that income, the deficit would be trivial. This unreported income is being earned, for the most part, not by drug dealers or Mob bosses but by tens of millions of people with run-of-the-mill jobs—nannies, barbers, Web-site designers, and construction workers—who are getting paid off the books. Ordinary Americans have gone underground, and, as the recovery continues to limp along, they seem to be doing it more and more.

Measuring an unreported economy is obviously tricky. But look closely and you can see the traces of a booming informal economy everywhere. As Feige said to me, “The best footprint left in the sand by this economy that doesn’t want to be observed is the use of cash.” His studies show that, while economists talk about the advent of a cashless society, Americans still hold an enormous amount of cold, hard cash—as much as seven hundred and fifty billion dollars. The percentage of Americans who don’t use banks is surprisingly high, and on the rise. Off-the-books activity also helps explain a mystery about the current economy: even though the percentage of Americans officially working has dropped dramatically, and even though household income is still well below what it was in 2007, personal consumption is higher than it was before the recession, and retail sales have been growing briskly (despite a dip in March). Bernard Baumohl, an economist at the Economic Outlook Group, estimates that, based on historical patterns, current retail sales are actually what you’d expect if the unemployment rate were around five or six per cent, rather than the 7.6 per cent we’re stuck with. The difference, he argues, probably reflects workers migrating into the shadow economy. “It’s typical that during recessions people work on the side while collecting unemployment,” Baumohl told me. “But the severity of the recession and the profound weakness of this recovery may mean that a lot more people have entered the underground economy, and have had to stay there longer.”

The increasing importance of the gray economy isn’t only a reaction to the downturn: studies suggest that the sector has been growing steadily over the years. In 1992, the I.R.S. estimated that the government was losing $80 billion a year in income-tax revenue. Its estimate for 2006 was $385 billion—almost five times as much (and still an underestimate, according to Feige’s numbers). The U.S. is certainly a long way from, say, Greece, where tax evasion is a national sport and the shadow economy accounts for twenty-seven per cent of G.D.P. But the forces pushing people to work off the books are powerful. Feige points to the growing distrust of government as one important factor. The desire to avoid licensing regulations, which force people to jump through elaborate hoops just to get a job, is another. Most important, perhaps, are changes in the way we work. As Baumohl put it, “For businesses, the calculus of hiring has fundamentally changed.” Companies have got used to bringing people on as needed and then dropping them when the job is over, and they save on benefits and payroll taxes by treating even full-time employees as independent contractors. Casual employment often becomes under-the-table work; the arrangement has become a way of life in the construction industry. In a recent California survey of three hundred thousand contractors, two-thirds said they had no direct employees, meaning that they did not need to pay workers’-compensation insurance or payroll taxes. In other words, for lots of people off-the-books work is the only job available.

not only bad statistics, but deeply flawed/erroneous theories, as well...,

wired | The fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience have had some rough sledding in recent years. The bumps have come from high-profile fraudsters, concerns about  findings that can’t be replicated, and criticism from within the scientific ranks about shoddy statistics. A new study adds to these woes, suggesting that a wide range of neuroscience studies lack the statistical power to back up their findings.

This problem isn’t just academic. The authors argue that there are real-world consequences, from wasting the lives of lab animals and squandering public funding on unreliable studies, to potentially stopping clinical trials with human patients prematurely (or not stopping them soon enough).

“This paper should help by revealing exactly how bad things have gotten,” said Hal Pashler, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego. Pashler was not involved with the new study, but he and colleagues have previously raised concerns about statistical problems with fMRI brain scan studies in human subjects.

The aim of the new study wasn’t to rake neuroscientists over the coals, but to get them talking about how to change the culture and the incentives that promote statistically unreliable studies, says co-author Marcus Munafò, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. “We’re really trying to be constructive about this.” Fist tap Dale.

just-in-time consumption-supply chains - intensely vulnerable to slow infrastructure repairs...,

WaPo | The slow pace of recovery from Hurricane Sandy generated frustration and anger across the New York region Friday as residents struggled with shortages of fuel, enduring power outages and a sense among those in the city’s outer boroughs that their suffering was being overlooked.

In Staten Island, where 19 people have died as a result of the storm, more than in any other New York City borough, exasperation at the lack of city, state and federal assistance mixed with bitterness and despair.

“I don’t see the Corps of Engineers,” Jim Brennan, a retired New York firefighter, said as he stepped over fragments of boat hulls and other debris blown onto his seafront lawn. “No National Guard. No Red Cross. No FEMA. No [New York Department of Environmental Protection]. No garbage trucks. American flags are flying all over this neighborhood. Where is our government?”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) canceled Sunday’s running of the New York City Marathon, yielding to critics who said it was insensitive to host a sporting event while authorities were still pulling the dead from the storm’s wreckage.

“While life in much of our city is getting back to normal, for New Yorkers that have lost loved ones, the storm left a wound that I think will never heal,” Bloomberg told reporters earlier Friday. “For those that lost homes or businesses, recovery will be long and difficult.”

kansas city, google fiber, and the digital divide...,

Wired | Two days before the deadline to get neighborhoods signed up, Google’s effort to bring ultra-high-speed internet to a major American city could end up reinforcing the digital divide.

When Google Fiber launched last month, the announcement of the service came with the caveat that to get the super-fast 1 gigabit broadband hookups, neighborhoods would have to pre-register a certain percentage of households for the service. The deadline for pre-registrations is Sunday at midnight.

Google has a map publicly tracking which neighborhoods meet the goal. As of Friday afternoon, Kansas City, Missouri, looks divided pretty much straight down the middle. On the western half of the city, nearly all neighborhoods have turned green, indicating they’ve met the goal. To the east, most are still yellow, meaning they haven’t met the goal. Right down the middle between the two halves runs Troost Avenue, the city’s historical socioeconomic and racial dividing line. Based on the map generated by the signup data, Google’s project is the latest to fall short of bridging that gap.

“The white, affluent neighborhoods qualified and the primarily black, lower-income neighborhoods didn’t,” says Michael Liimatta, who runs a Kansas City nonprofit that works to bring broadband access to low-income residents. Liimatta’s group, Connect for Good, focused on getting one of the poorest neighborhoods in Kansas City, Kansas, qualified. They succeeded thanks to heavy campaigning and door-to-door efforts, he says.

Google did not go into Kansas City blind to the issue of the digital divide, says company spokeswoman Jenna Wandres. It has 60 representatives on the streets trying to convince people without internet access of the benefits of getting their homes online, Wandres says. (That number will go up to about 100 for this final weekend, she says.) But the process is a challenge, with typical conversations lasting around 25 minutes per resident. Before coming into Kansas City, Wandres says Google did a survey that found about 25 percent of residents didn’t have internet access at home. While affordability is one part of the equation, she says Google found another factor keeping people offline was relevance. “They don’t think they need it,” Wandres says. “They don’t see why.”

the story of broke

Video - New video from the excellent storyofstuff crew

storyofstuff |  The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working. But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this ‘dinosaur economy’ on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money. The Story of Broke calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more—that can deliver jobs AND a healthier environment. It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better.