We might be seeing a significant political change, with the left reclaiming freedom and anti-statism from the right.

I'm prompted to say this by the Black Lives Matter slogan, "defund the police" which invites us to see the state as an oppressor.

Many of you might think the slogan "defund the police" goes too far. No matter: we don't know what's right unless we know what's too much. And what is right - as Elinor Ostrom showed - is that the police should be small and locally accountable.

Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage, or as an inconveniency, to the society? The answer seems at first abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor & miserable.

It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, & lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged...

Libraries are still just about the only place in America anyone can go and sit and use a computer and the internet without buying anything. All over the country, library closures during the pandemic have highlighted just how many people have no dependable source of internet on their own.  

According to a Pew survey published last year, less than two-thirds of Americans in rural areas have a broadband internet connection at home. Among Americans with household incomes below $30,000, four out of 10 don’t have a computer, and three out of 10 don’t have a smartphone.

As I’ve written in the recent past, I believe that the current political uprising has a chance at being an enormously positive development. I worry though that it will be limited by the power of political Calvinism.

I know I’ve heard the term used before, though I can’t remember from who. By political Calvinism I mean the tendency within the left to see the structural injustices of the world as inherent and immutable, so baked into the cake of the current context, history, the United States of America, etc., that they will always exist. The stain of injustice can never be rubbed out. This is most obvious when discussing racial dynamics. White people are inherently in possession of white privilege, as many will tell you – most insistently white liberals, in my experience. Well, yes, today all white people enjoy white privilege, though the valence of that advantage varies with other factors in their lives. But the degree and intensity and in fact existence of white privilege is mutable; if we had a real racial awakening and all people worked to end white privilege, it would end. And not only do I not think this is a crazy thing to believe, I think believing it is a necessary precondition to being an agent of positive change!

Eternally unprofitable and burning cash because the name of the game is now consolidation or bust, Uber has made an offer to buy rival food delivery company Postmates as the mobility war intensifies.

As it stands, ride-hailing alone isn’t going to cut it, and investors still seem to not be shying away from a company itself it has admitted may never be profitable.

During the four-way race for President in 1860, the six-year-old Republican Party found support from a new generation of voters who helped push Abraham Lincoln to victory. They were known as the “Wide Awakes,” because of their youth, enthusiasm, and torch-lit nighttime marches. “Now the old men are folding their arms and going to sleep,” said William H. Seward while campaigning for Lincoln, “and the young men are Wide Awake.”

The only polling in 1860 was the actual voting. Turnout was 81.2% of those eligible to vote (a cohort that consisted only of white men). That’s the the second highest turnout in our history, after the election of 1876. The highest turnout of the twenty-first century so far has been 58.2%, in 2008.

And, at least until recently, SROs were hugely popular. In a 2018 poll, Starr writes, 80 percent of parents favored posting armed police officers at their child’s school. That made superintendents like him cautious about airing “even the mildest criticism” of SROs,” he writes. “Privately, though, many district leaders will tell you that if they had a choice, they’d rather not have armed officers in the schools at all.”

Cut to a couple of days ago, when I come across this article in Nature – the first deep dive attempting to answer the question of just how protective those coronavirus antibodies are.

And, at first blush at least, the news isn’t great.

On July 28, 1932, President Herbert Hoover dispatched federal troops and tanks to disperse the “Bonus Army,” tens of thousands of jobless World War I veterans and their families who’d been protesting in the nation’s capital. The troops used tear gas. Two men and two infants were reported dead. As one of the first major protests in which the American government used tear gas—which is considered a weapon of war—on its own citizens, the Bonus Army incident created public outrage, ruining any chance of Hoover’s reelection. For the chemical companies trying to sell tear gas to law enforcement, however, the Bonus Army was a successful demonstration of their product.

It’s one of the more important things in game theory that a signal has to be a costly signal.... A reputation in deterrence theory is something that is worth having, but not worth getting.

ZEIT: Der ehemalige schwedische Staatsepidemiologe Johan Giesecke hat gesagt: “Der Unterschied zwischen Schweden und Deutschland ist, dass Deutschland seine Wirtschaft ruiniert.”

Angner: Johan Giesecke ist so viel in den Medien, weil er sehr selbstbewusst ist und einfach sachen raushaut. Ein klarer fall von Selbstüberchätzung.

Before looking at the impact on New York City and other dense urban centers in the US, the fact that work from home has worked at all calls into question many heretofore unquestioned norms of office like, like the true utility of having workers on premises. How much of formal and informal information-sharing is actually productive, as opposed to gossip and political jockeying? For instance, the pre-Carly-Fiorina Hewlett Packard was cognizant of the potential for meetings to be time-wasters, and required that they be held with all participants standing up.

Caveats: data is really limited.  Studies are sort of trickling out in pre-print form and in various esoteric journals. But I’ll point out a couple that hold water for me. The first, a pre-print out of China, looked at just over 2000 COVID-positive individuals and reported that there was a higher infection rate in people with Type A blood.

Transmission of viruses was lower with physical distancing of 1 m or more, compared with a distance of less than 1 m (n=10 736, pooled adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0·18, 95% CI 0·09 to 0·38; risk difference [RD] −10·2%, 95% CI −11·5 to −7·5; moderate certainty); protection was increased as distance was lengthened (change in relative risk [RR] 2·02 per m; pinteraction=0·041; moderate certainty). Face mask use could result in a large reduction in risk of infection (n=2647; aOR 0·15, 95% CI 0·07 to 0·34, RD −14·3%, −15·9 to −10·7; low certainty), with stronger associations with N95 or similar respirators compared with disposable surgical masks or similar (eg, reusable 12–16-layer cotton masks; pinteraction=0·090; posterior probability >95%, low certainty).

There’s a joke: What do you call 1000 good cops and ten bad cops? 1010 bad cops....

It seems paradoxical at first. While people do escape to cheery landscapes, like the farm of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing, they also spend their money on games engineered to inspire terror, fear, and anxiety. Doom Eternal, Nioh, and Resident Evil all saw high download numbers in the last few months.

What’s the appeal? In the journal Preternature, authors Robert M. Geraci, Nat Recine, and Samantha Fox make a compelling case that video games like these have a meaningful psychological role, especially today. “Faced with physical and psychological dangers, human beings imagine them as monsters and seek to master them,” they explain.

“The horrific experience of videogames, and hence their cathartic appeal, emerges when a game produces a constant level of anxiety in players while allowing the players to act on it,” the authors explain.

Gloves, masks, and other personal protective equipment (PPE) are key to keeping us safe, especially as we began to ease the lockdown rules. Yet, the environmental watchdogs worry that all that PPE will flow into the ocean. ” If they’re thrown on the streets, when it rains the gloves and masks will eventually end up in the sea,” biologist Anastasia Miliou at the Archipelagos Institute of Marine Conservation in Greece told Deutsche Welle.

Heroism by the many or the repeated heroism by occupant after occupant of a given role indicates the failure of the surrounding system. Adequate supplies, for example, or prompt pre-emptive action would have changed the effort required of many health care providers from heroic to merely demanding. In that sense, the accolades, deeply deserved as they are, can serve to divert our attention from the less glamorous, indeed the mundane work of repairing the systems so that heroes need not show up en masse to hold together a wheezing and crippled health care system.

Vavilov hypothesized that farmers never intentionally tried to domesticate the rye plant. Ancient weeding methods were based on visual cues—if something looked like a weed, it was plucked. Farmers spent generations unintentionally selecting for rye plants that looked like useful wheat, not weeds. Eventually, rye mimicked wheat so successfully, the two became almost indistinguishable.

The pants allegedly disappeared in 2005. Whenever the business offered to settle, Pearson moved the goalposts, saying he remained unsatisfied. His demands continued to escalate, and he also offered a ridiculous theory of the damages he sought under the D.C. consumer-protection statute. By April 2007, he was demanding over $65 million to settle a claim for a pair of missing pants. The case went to trial, and he lost. He appealed and lost. He sought en banc review and lost. That was, at least, the end of the litigation against the dry cleaners. But Pearson wasn’t done. After losing his ALJ job—some believed the litigation showed poor judgment, you see—he sued for wrongful termination, still insisting he had been in the right. He lost. He appealed, and lost.

Turns out that if you persist in making the same frivolous arguments for a sufficient number of years, the bar association may take notice. In 2015, the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel filed ethics charges against Pearson, which, of course, he furiously contested on the grounds that he had been right all along. He lost. And, of course, he appealed....

US cities vary widely in the number of cops they have relative to their population, as the graph below (drawn from data assembled by Governing magazine). Among big cities, DC, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia top the list, with over 40 officers per 10,000 people. These are well above the national average of just under 28 per 10,000. Cities toward the bottom of the list have 20 or fewer.

But one question has been sitting in the back of my mind since the talk of curve-flattening started.  Does everyone get the coronavirus eventually? It’s an important question. This is a novel virus for which none of us are likely to have any existing immunity. We are ripe for infection and the rate of spread (without social distancing) is rapid. The presence of asymptomatic spread makes the situation even worse.

For COVID-19, we probably have to have 65-70% of the population immune before the thing dies out. I’ll just point out we are nowhere close to that. Even in New York city, American epicenter of the disease, seroprevalence studies only suggest about 25% of the population is immune

“Our whole reason for lobbying for looser gun laws and amassing huge personal arsenals of weapons these past years was so that we could ensure the security of a free state and protect the people from an oppressive government. And then it actually happened, and the whole rising up against a tyrannical government thing just totally slipped our minds, which is a little embarrassing,” a sheepish NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said.

When property damage and theft happens as a side-effect of real mass protest, authorities in a democracy cannot baton, tear gas, or shoot their way to legitimacy. People want social order, but this isn’t like quelling a riot after a sports game. The key issue—as the Governor of Minnesota put it the other day—is that “there are more of them than us”. All the tactical gear in the world isn’t worth a damn, ultimately, if enough of the population ends up in open revolt against civil authority. There are just too many people.

But if the bulk of a city’s population really is directly engaged in mass protest or indirectly supportive of it, and these protests are met with force by the authorities, then violent disorder will start to look less like pockets of disruption disapproved of by all and more like the loss of legitimacy.

In the absence of mass mobilization for protest, imposing “Law and Order” by force is usually a politically successful tactic, at least in the short-run. The demand for order is the most basic demand of political life. But attempting to impose order by force when people are protesting in the streets en masse is much riskier, both for the leader wanting to “dominate” and for political institutions generally.

With a background in indexing, I like to compare the index of a book with the taxonomy-enhanced search capabilities of a website, whereas the table of contents of a book is like the navigation scheme. A table of contents or navigation scheme is a higher-level, pre-defined structure of content, that guides users to the general organization of content and tasks. It helps users understand the scope of the content available, provides guidance on where and what content to find, and aids in exploration. An index or search feature, including faceted search, on the other hand, enables to user to find specific information or content items of interest. A taxonomy, regardless of its display type, serves the function of an index, not the table of contents.

The people we see are, by definition, those who are outdoors and thus who are disproportionately likely to be breaching the lockdown. What Mr Hannan isn’t seeing are the countless thousands of us staying indoors and observing the lockdown.

The social sciences are, as Jon Elster said, fundamentally a collection of mechanisms. But many of these are unseen. It is the role of social science to expose these mechanisms, and to show us that what we see is not all there is. As Marx said: "If there were no difference between essence and appearance, there would be no need for science."

On June 20, 1917, Lucy Burns, co-founder of the National Woman’s Party (NWP), and Dora Lewis gathered with other suffragists in front of the White House. They held a banner criticizing President Wilson’s opposition to women’s suffrage: “We, the Women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy…. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement.”

With several universities now coming to grips with the fact that they will still be online in the Summer (and most likely the Fall), several are turning to how to quickly train their entire faculty in online teaching in a hurry.

Out of all the different ways to approach learning theory, I like focus on power dynamics first when it comes to designing a course. So think about the overall power dynamic you want to see happening in your course. This can change from week to week, but in general most courses stick to one for the most part. The question is: who determines what learners will learn in your course, and who directs how it is learned?

This is such a strange and necessary time to talk about education technology, to take a class about education technology, to get a degree in education technology because what, in the past, was so often framed as optional or aspirational is now compulsory — and compulsory under some of the worst possible circumstances

One of the reasons that I am less than sanguine about most education technology is because I don't consider it this autonomous, context-free entity. Ed-tech is not a tool that exists only in the service of improving teaching and learning, although that's very much how it gets talked about. There's much more to think about than the pedagogy too, than whether ed-tech makes that better or worse or about the same just more expensive. Pedagogy doesn't occur in a vacuum. It has an institutional history; pedagogies have politics. Tools have politics. They have histories. They're developed and funded and adopted and rejected for a variety of reasons other than "what works." Even the notion of "what works" should prompt us to ask all sorts of questions about "for whom," "in what way," and "why."

Surveillance is not prevalent simply because that's the technology that's being sold to schools. Rather, in many ways, surveillance reflects the values we have prioritized: control, compulsion, efficiency.

Independent learning is a skill, and like most skills, you need to start slowly and carefully. Suddenly being thrown into ten courses online is not the best way to go. Many will sink, although some will certainly swim. However, experience tells us that graduate, older and lifelong learners all do much better in online learning than undergraduates. Blended learning – a mix of face-to-face and online – though is a very good way to ease gently into online learning. Introducing online or digital learning gradually in first year, supported by face-to-face classes, is a much better strategy.

As the author of a book on opportunity cost, I might be expected to be enthusiastic about the idea that trade-offs are always important in economic and policy choices. This idea is summed up in the acryonymic slogan TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). In fact, however, a crucial section of Economics in Two Lessons is devoted to showing that There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch. It is only when all free lunches have been taken off the table that we reach a position described, in the standard jargon, as Pareto-optimal.

To me, this is an example (and there are many right now) of the extent to which the fairness of the legal system may turn less on the words we use in a law than on the discretion of those who have the power to enforce it.

This evolved into an entire subcultural practice, called Grangerization. Hobbyists used printed books as the basis for a multidimensional media project. They pasted prints, as well as pages of text from other books, into the original volume, making connections between related topics.

In some cases, the resulting work smacked of obsessive fandom. One collector expanded a copy of an 1828 biography of Lord Byron from two volumes to five, rebinding the pages to accommodate 184 illustrations and 14 letters and autographs. Another turned a three-volume 1872 biography of Charles Dickens into nine oversized books packed with broadsides for performances, actor portraits, letters, and images taken from illustrated editions of the author’s books.

Grangerization reached its height of popularity in the first half of the nineteenth century. But not everyone saw it as an innovative, creative hobby. The idea of removing pages from one book to create something new infuriated some critics. One called Grangerization a “monstrous practice” of “hungry and rapacious book-collectors.” Another diagnosed its practitioners with “a vehement passion, a furious perturbation to be closely observed and radically treated wherever it appears, for it is a contagious and delirious mania.”

One advantage of today’s digital media is that we can freely copy material without tearing up precious original work. Of course, today’s Grangerizers have their own ethical questions, like plagiarism, to consider.

"The variation being meant as an evident one, accordingly as presenting in pure intuition the possibilities themselves as possibilities, its correlate is an intuitive and apodictic consciousness of something universal. The eidos itself is a beheld or beholdable universal, one that is pure, 'unconditioned,' that is to say according to its own intuition sense, a universal not conditioned by any fact."

A little-known Democratic senator from Missouri rides the public anger, consequently emerging as a national leader. “Their greed knows no limit,” said Harry Truman in February 1942 in talking about military contractors accused of gouging the government at such a critical time.

The public agreed. A Gallup Poll noted that 69 percent of Americans wanted the government to exert controls on the profits earned by contractors during the war.

Private sector partnership in the face of community need is nothing new, and has long been integral in national response and rebuilding. Take, for example, the case of the Waffle House Index.

Waffle Houses are what they sound like: homey diners that dominate the southern part of the United States, serving up staple favorites like pies and iced tea. With that in mind, the index sounds like a whimsical measurement, but it actually refers to a serious, though informal, measurement of a crisis’s severity. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) uses the restaurant chain to gauge how badly an area is affected. As a former FEMA official told NPR, “If the Waffle House is open, everything’s good.”