randomWalks

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peppersprayingcop:

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monkeyajb:

The New York Times is doing some interesting work around the “Shrinking Middle Class.” This piece demonstrates the shift away from middle-income and shows the exit of money from the city to the suburbs, and the increase in both affluent and poor neighborhoods at the expense of middle-income.

The NYTimes piece doesn’t animate the shift and it really bothered me because a graphic like this should so obviously be an animation. So I made one myself. (Dark green is most affluent, dark purple is the most poor.)

Philadelphia county becomes markedly more purple in 40 years. Notice also that almost no regions show any reversal of trends — green gets greener, or purple gets purpler.

It is extremely easy for systems to become biased, even if none of the individual people in those systems intends to be biased. This is partly a cognitive problem, that people harbor unconscious bias, and partly an organizational problem, that even a collection of unbiased actors can work together to accidentally create a biased system. And when those systems are examined scientifically, they can be reformed to reduce their bias.

By breeding the fat out of turkeys and pigs, we have bred our own ignorance into other species.

www.youtube.com/watch

This is worth watching through the 3m mark.

It not about rich people having more money. It about how they got money. It about how they take opportunity away from rest of us, for sake of having more money. It how they willing to take risks that destroy economy — knowing full well what could and would happen — putting millions out of work, while creating nothing of value, and all the while crowing that they John Galt, creating wealth for everyone.

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occupyposters:

Stanley Donwood. (Source.) Download PDF.

Authorities have long claimed that they were merely battling the “black bloc” of violent anarchists. But when you look at all these videos, the bogeyman isn’t there. Instead, it’s a dozen scared kids and a police officer named John Pike spraying them in the face from three feet away. And while it’s his finger pulling the trigger, the police system is what put him in the position to be standing in front of those students. I am sure that he is a man like me, and he didn’t become a cop to shoot history majors with pepper spray. But the current policing paradigm requires that students get shot in the eyes with a chemical weapon if they resist, however peaceably. Someone has to do it.

I had been writing very short summaries (usually 3 or 4 sentences) and then tweeting the links to the sources of the stories (New York Times, AdAge.com, etc.) rather than back to Poynter. Julie wanted our thousands of Twitter followers to stop by Poynter’s site, then decide whether to check out the original story.

Here is your library, more or less intact. We will give it back if you hand over your collective future without argument. Just leave it in the trashcan on the corner of Wall Street.

It’s true that iTunes Match is offering matched tracks for artists it doesn’t officially sell in its catalog—AC/DC among them.

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(via Why did the ‘New Yorker’ reject this R. Crumb cover?)

Unmasking an anti-Mac blogger may not be life-changing, but if you’re an anonymous blogger writing about Chinese censorship or Mexican drug cartels, the consequences could be dire.

Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles.

Who shovels Bank of America’s snow? We do. Who hauled away the tree that fell in Bank of America’s yard? We did. But there are only so many hours and dollars we can invest in maintaing the Bank of America’s house.

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This is a found poem comprised of actual reminders my iPhone has created for me using the Siri speech recognition feature. I’m going to miss this silliness when the speech recognition improves.

It would be so easy to say, ‘Well I’m going to retire, I’m going to sit around, watch television or eat bonbons,’ but somebody’s got to keep ’em awake and let ’em know what is really going on in this world.

If “young, white, geeky, and Stanford/Harvard/MIT dropout”, then “invest”, is a kind of mental shortcut that is anything but objective. This is mirror-tocracy not meritocracy.

www.youtube.com/watch

jsmooth995:

Here is the TEDx Talk I gave at Hampshire College, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race”

I just noticed last week that Google Maps knew the location of my laptop computer, even though I had never told it where I was. After a bit of sleuthing, it turns out that Google probably got this information when a someone with an Android phone visited. The phone sniffed my WiFi ports, read the GPS location, and reported this back to Google location services. They did this without my knowledge, and without my permission.

It has to be the most disingenuous opt-out functionality ever. Google might as well make people solve calculus problems to opt-out.