Kevin McDormand

Reports that President Trump was considering a plan to release detained undocumented immigrants in the nation’s sanctuary cities has put the spotlight back on a controversial immigration policy. The Onion takes a look at the pros and cons of sanctuary cities.

Read more...

“I know that, as a white man, I have to hold my fellow white men accountable.”

Brave!

At SXSW, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked by an audience member about the economic challenge of a significant percentage of our labor force being replaced by automation. She responded, in part, by suggesting we decouple the idea of employment with being able to remain alive:

We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should not feel nervous about the toll booth collector not having to collect tolls anymore. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.

Then she went on to say:

We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in. Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.

Her full answer, including a bit about “automated inequality”, is worth worth watching in full, starting at ~55:15:

In a 1970 article in New York magazine, the architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller wrote about the collision of technology and “this nonsense of earning a living”:

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

(thx to @claytoncubitt for the AOC-Fuller connection)

NVIDIA has been doing lots of interesting things with deep learning algorithms lately (like AI-Generated Human Faces That Look Amazingly Real). Their most recent effort is the development and training of a program that takes rough sketches and converts them into realistic images.

A novice painter might set brush to canvas aiming to create a stunning sunset landscape — craggy, snow-covered peaks reflected in a glassy lake — only to end up with something that looks more like a multi-colored inkblot.

But a deep learning model developed by NVIDIA Research can do just the opposite: it turns rough doodles into photorealistic masterpieces with breathtaking ease. The tool leverages generative adversarial networks, or GANs, to convert segmentation maps into lifelike images.

Here’s a post I did 10 years ago that shows how far sketch-to-photo technology has come.

Did you know that only 14% of civilian workers in the United States have access to paid parental leave? Yeah, let that hit you. A quarter of women in this country have to go back to work only two weeks after having a baby due to the lack of paid leave policies in place. This is a policy that must change before women can truly achieve parity in the workforce.

Unless, of course, you are my therapist, who should never be allowed to skip a session with me because I need her desperately.

Reports have shown that six months of maternity is the minimum amount of time required to optimize the mother and the baby’s health. However, if my therapist left me for six months, I would fall apart and disintegrate. So, I’m thinking maybe her maternity leave could be like, six days? Thirteen if it’s a C-section? Does that feel fair? It does to me!

The human body takes forty week to recover from childbirth, and the postpartum period can be unbelievably stressful and difficult for a mother. Though I will say, the anxiety and general pain I would feel if my therapist had to take maternity leave is potentially similar? I have never had a baby, but I do consider my therapist my professional mother. I hope she considers that if she ever decides to have her own baby, which in my eyes, feels very selfish considering I need her.

Workplace equality starts with not pitting motherhood and career success against each other. A parent-to-be shouldn’t have to choose between raising their new baby and their job. But until there are policies in place that grant parents the leave they need, we won’t get there.

But also, now that I’m thinking about it, if my therapist decides to have a baby and take a maternity leave, that is sort of jeopardizing my health, so for true equality to actually exist, my therapist should have her baby right after one of my sessions, spend the next six days recovering, then be sitting in her chair the following week ready to listen to me complain about my love life for an hour.

That’s only fair.

WASHINGTON—Shedding new light on efforts to conserve the vital natural resource, a report released Wednesday by the Environmental Protection Agency found that 37 percent of all water waste in the United States results from husky kids doing a cannonball into the pool at a country club. “Our data indicate more than a…

Read more...

Brian Chirls took the approval ratings for Richard Nixon’s presidency and using sounds from The Legend of Zelda’s classic Dungeon Theme, he made a data-driven soundscape of the public perception of Nixon’s tenure in the White House. Here’s what his approval rating looked like:

And here’s the resulting audio track:

The sound effects mostly represent actions the protagonist Link takes like the “sword slash”, things that happen to him like a grunt when he gets hurt, or the status of the game like the low health alarm that beeps when Link has only half a “heart container” left and can only take one or two more hits before he dies and the game is over. The goal of this project is to create a piece of audio that sounds like a typical playthrough of the game and also accurately tells the story of Nixon’s fall as represented by the data.

What a cool example of using the familiar to explain or illustrate the unfamiliar. If you’ve ever played Zelda, you can clearly hear Nixon doing more and more poorly as the track goes on — he’s taking damage, the dungeon boss sound chimes in right around when Watergate is ramping up, and he’s gaining fewer hearts. It’s like he’s a novice player armed only with the wooden sword trying to defeat the level 3 dungeon without a potion…the end comes pretty quickly.

For the NY Times, Matthew Desmond writes about how raising the minimum wage makes a huge difference in people’s lives.

A $15 minimum wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect. But why? Poverty can be unrelenting, shame-inducing and exhausting. When people live so close to the bone, a small setback can quickly spiral into a major trauma. Being a few days behind on the rent can trigger a hefty late fee, which can lead to an eviction and homelessness. An unpaid traffic ticket can lead to a suspended license, which can cause people to lose their only means of transportation to work. In the same way, modest wage increases have a profound impact on people’s well-being and happiness. Poverty will never be ameliorated on the cheap. But this truth should not prevent us from acknowledging how powerfully workers respond to relatively small income boosts.

Another observation in the article reminded me of a passage from Matthew Walker’s piece in The Guardian asserting that sleep is an amazing and underutilized performance-enhancing drug:

Studies have linked higher minimum wages to decreases in low birth-weight babies, lower rates of teen alcohol consumption and declines in teen births. A 2016 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that between roughly 2,800 and 5,500 premature deaths that occurred in New York City from 2008 to 2012 could have been prevented if the city’s minimum wage had been $15 an hour during that time, instead of a little over $7 an hour. That number represents up to one in 12 of all people who died prematurely in those five years. The chronic stress that accompanies poverty can be seen at the cellular level. It has been linked to a wide array of adverse conditions, from maternal health problems to tumor growth. Higher wages bring much-needed relief to poor workers. The lead author of the 2016 study, Tsu-Yu Tsao, a research director at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, was “very surprised by the magnitude of the findings.” He is unaware of any drug on the market that comes close to having this big of an effect.

Desmond is the author of the award-winning Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

Behind the Curve, now available on Netflix, is a 2018 documentary about the global community of people who believe that the Earth is flat. In this scene at the end of the film (um, spoilers?), a Flat-Earther named Jeran Campanella devises a simple experiment that he claims will prove that the Earth is flat…but very quickly proves the opposite:

Campanella’s reaction: “Interesting. Interesting. That’s interesting.” This is one of two straightforward experiments shown in the film that are devised by Flat-Earthers to prove the planet’s flatness that end up affirming that the Earth is indeed round (or, more accurately, an oblate spheroid).

One of the more jaw-dropping segments of the documentary comes when Bob Knodel, one of the hosts on a popular Flat Earth YouTube channel, walks viewers through an experiment involving a laser gyroscope. As the Earth rotates, the gyroscope appears to lean off-axis, staying in its original position as the Earth’s curvature changes in relation. “What we found is, is when we turned on that gyroscope we found that we were picking up a drift. A 15 degree per hour drift,” Knodel says, acknowledging that the gyroscope’s behavior confirmed to exactly what you’d expect from a gyroscope on a rotating globe.

“Now, obviously we were taken aback by that. ‘Wow, that’s kind of a problem,’” Knodel says. “We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.”

Knodel & Campanella are the co-hosts of a YouTube channel called Globebusters (I’m not going to link to it…YouTube’s conspiracy-minded algorithms don’t need any help) where they claim to debunk the Earth’s curvature and heliocentrism as well as discussing how NASA fakes space activities. Their failed experiments don’t seem to have diminished their Flat Earth zeal. One of their recent videos, nearly 4 hours long, is an attempt to “[debunk] the bogus claim that Globebusters proved a 15 degree per hour rotation of the Earth” and another, also almost 4 hours long, is a rebuttal to the “misrepresentation” of their views and experiments in Behind the Curve.

This trailer made by cinematographer and director Morgan Cooper imagines a contemporary reboot of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that’s a little darker and grittier than the original. I dunno about you, but that’s one of the best fan-made trailers I’ve ever seen. I say give Cooper the show and let him run with it.

Street photographer Patrick Barr has been out photographing NYC since the 1990s. Barr also goes by the name of Tiger Hood (or Nappy Gilmore) and when he’s out on the street selling prints of his photographs, he passes the time playing a street golf game of his own invention.

It’s a game that requires only three items: a golf club, a newspaper-stuffed milk carton, and a crate. What was initially just a way for Barr to pass time has gained traction from major news outlets and celebrities on a global scale. However, street golf seems to overshadow his true passion… photography. Barr’s archive consists of thousands of mind blowing film photographs of NYC from the 1990’s to 2000’s. His goal was to preserve a time and place that he predicted would dissolve in the coming years. With his archive as evidence, he predicted correctly.

You can find some of Barr’s photos on Flickr and Instagram but if you want to buy a print, you’ll have to catch him on the streets of lower Manhattan.

YOUR LITTLE HEAD—Confirming that oh, sure, probably no one gets into the prestigious university without their wealthy parents pulling some strings, a report released Wednesday in the wake of a major college admissions scandal stated that if it makes you feel better, you can believe bribery is the only reason you…

Read more...