The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has selected the city of Beijing to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. It beat out Almaty, largest city in the expansive Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. This makes Beijing the first city to host both the summer and the winter Olympic games, a sort of honor. But wouldn’t it be better if both Almaty and Beijing had shared the games? Or better, still, that cities around the world bear the burden of the Olympics, simultaneously?
The IOC has long fielded criticism for favoring individual cities in Europe and North America as hosts. As evidenced by the above map, countries with the most geopolitical clout have hosted the greatest number of Olympic games. So for nations that have never before hosted a major, international sporting event, the Olympics may be seen as a gateway to first-world status.
In recent years, many cities in up-and-coming countries have made impressive bids at game-hosting privileges. Rio, Istanbul, and Havana all made bids for the 2012 games; Baku and Doha vied for 2016; and Istanbul, Baku, and Doha all bid once more for 2020 (which ultimately went to Tokyo). These last threeare once more considering bids, this time for the 2024 summer games, along with Nairobi, Casablanca, and Kuala Lumpur-Singapore (bidding as a dual package).
But with the privilege of hosting comes responsibilities—governments must invest large sums of money to build up infrastructure in a short period of time. And in places without reliable systems in place to ensure development is pursued ethically, it’s ordinary citizens that suffer most.
Expensive, slapdash construction projects like arenas and pavilions offer plenty of opportunities for human-rights abuse. Doha, host to the 2022 World Cup, has come under intense international criticism for reported human-rights violations committed in the rapid-build up. Hundreds of guest workers have died constructing the World Cup stadium in Qatar.
Some say the Russian city of Sochi’s hosting privileges for the winter 2014 Olympic games actually emboldened Russian president Vladimir Putin’s interferences in Ukraine. Just across the Black Sea was Crimea, which the Russian Federation annexed against international law, and Eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces have been accused of stoking a violent secessionist movement. Indeed, Sochi was a bright spot in a year of bad PR for the Russian Federation.
The IOC does not seem yet to have figured out how to take human rights records into account when selecting Olympic Games sites. And the fact that this week’s decision for the 2022 winter games came down to Beijing, China and Almaty, Kazakhstan—both cities in countries with notoriously poor human-rights records—suggests that the IOC is not racing to do so.
The quick solution? Do away with host cities all together.
The concept of a single city hosting international games is redundant. The Olympics were only ever consolidated to a single city because, when the games began at the end of the 19th century, travel was far more expensive and impractical than it is today. For example, it wouldn’t be feasible for German or American press to cover a footrace in Montreal, archery in Melbourne, and shot put in Moscow.
In 2015, why can’t ski jumpers jump in Geneva, while ice dancers dance in Almaty? Why can’t swimmers swim in Sydney while sprinters sprint in Nairobi? The infrastructure for any city to host a handful of events surely exists, meaning human-rights abuses and human-trafficking linked to construction labor will be minimal. And because news cameras from around the world won’t be trained on a single city for more than a few days, repressive regimes might not be as sensitive to expressions of dissidence.
Abolishing the tradition of a single host city would also address that chief criticism of the Olympics—that the IOC favors Western locales above all other. The 28 sports featured in the 2016 Summer Olympics could have been easily divided between Rio, Tokyo, Prague, Madrid, Doha, Chicago, and Baku; four events per city. That’s less taxpayer money spent per host city, lower instances of human-rights abuse, and, admittedly, still a dash of good PR for repressive governments. Everybody wins.
Andrew Gulli has an unusual passion: finding unpublished short stories by famous American authors. He searches through libraries and archives, finds works, researches to confirm they've never been published — then publishes them
With a career spanning over half a century, Samuel R. Delany has seen many changes within the science fiction landscape. The New Yorker has an essay about Delany and his life, with a particular look at his experiences within the science fiction community as a person of color.
Who you gonna call when some sick kids need some cheering up? The Ghostbusters, of course.
Yes, it turns out that our new Ghostbusters (that’s Leslie Jones, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Melissa McCarthy, in case you needed reminding, Dudebusters) visited a children’s hospital on Saturday and not only were they rocking full costumes (proton packs and all), but it looks like they were in the highest of spirits (pun kinda intended?) the whole time.
The photos of the gals posing with the patients were initially posted online by the folks at Tufts Medical Center, which houses the Floating Hospital for Children they were visiting, and you can view them all on Tufts’ Facebook page. Beware of the trolls, though, as they are out in such full force in the comments section that the hospital (!!) had to post a status reminding people that comments “with profanity” would be taken off the page (!!!!!!!!!).
Seriously, people, whether or not you’re for these specific Ghostbusters, there’s no reason to be posting rude comments on photos posted by and featuring a children’s hospital. Talk about ruining childhoods.
That moment you can’t find your dog and you even go outside looking for him…only to walk in the house and find him snuggled up in bed next to your toddler. People that say “money can’t buy happiness” have never paid an adoption fee. 10 years ago I left a rescue with this little guy and I often wonder…who rescued who? I gave him a home, but he gave me so, so much more.
this is one of the few times I've seen a fight where the fighter lines up a sure-fire win and eschews it for 20 more seconds of punching the opponent in the face, for fun
note that she won anyway and it still only took 34 seconds
Ronda Rousey is not here to play your petty mind games.
Don't even try to mess with Ronda Rousey — she will beat you down in 34 seconds and make you eat your words.
That's what happened to Rousey's latest KO, Bethe Correia. Correia tried everything from screaming "DON'T CRY" in Rousey's face...
...to making comments about Rousey's father's suicide.
"She is not mentally healthy, she needs to take care of herself," Correia said. "She is winning, so everybody is around her cheering her up, but when she realizes she is not everything that she believes she is, I don't know what might happen. I hope she does not kill herself later on."
But ultimately, Rousey laid the last punch, spitting Correia's words back in her face: "Don't cry."
"I said the exact same thing she was saying to me at weigh-ins," Rousey said at the post-fight press conference. "You know, she was screaming in my face at weigh-ins. She was saying, 'Don't cry.' So I turned around to her after I knocked her out and I said, 'Don't cry.'"
If you find yourself facing Rousey, I first suggest you turn around and run as fast as you can. If that's not an option, then I suggest you follow the words of wisdom my mom always told me growing up: If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. And then maybe -- just maybe -- she'll go easy on you.
But probably not.
★★★
SB Nation presents: This is the summer of amazing sports women
The trophy is getting closer to full-on acceptance.
The Internet's favorite trophy is back. Last year, Minnesota and Faux Pelini created the $5 Bits of Broken Chair Trophy to give the illustrious Minnesota-Nebraska rivalry a trophy it deserves. It is exactly what you would expect: a crudely-made trophy with a broken chair and two $5 bills glued to it.
Minnesota has clearly embraced the rivalry, but will Nebraska? Off Tackle Empire asked new Nebraska coach Mike Riley if he would hoist the trophy, should the Huskers win this year. His way-too-polite response? "Yeah, sure!"
A start-up tech company recently announced that it is developing the world’s first Braille smartwatch.
Based in South Korea, Dot wants to develop affordable technology for the visually impaired.
“Until now, if you got a message on iOS from your girlfriend, for example, you had to listen to Siri read it to you in that voice, which is impersonal,” said Dot CEO Eric Ju Yoon Kim, speaking to Tech in Asia. “Wouldn't you rather read it yourself and hear your girlfriend's voice saying it in your head?”
Driven mostly by the continual releases of Apple products, the market for smartwatches and smart devices has recently grown exponentially.
According to the World Health Organization, there are 285 million people worldwide with severe visual impairments. 39 million of them are classed as legally blind.
Currently, smart braille devices are on the market at a cost of $3,000 and above. Dot aims to make this technology available for a fraction of the cost at less than $300.
This product will be the first smartwatch option for the blind.
It works by using a Braille display on a smooth face, with four depressed dots or “cells” that continually refresh and reveal new Braille characters as they rise and fall.
The size of a watch, the product will be light and easy to use. Dot.
If you’re a speedy reader, the device can also be altered by the user to change the character refreshing speed.
Haptic technology allows for the smartwatch to provide information to its user in real time, using touch alone. The smartwatch can connect to any device using a Bluetooth connection, which converts any text into Braille letters.
With the battery lasting 10 hours on a single charge, that’s a lot of reading.
Developed in South Korea, the smartwatch has successfully been tested on the country’s Braille screens, which are present on ATMs and in train stations and continually update and deliver information.
“90 percent of blind people become blind after birth,” said Kim, “and there’s nothing for them right now – they lose their access to information so suddenly.”
Dot brings the modern wearable technology of now to the blind. The start-up will make 10,000 Dot smartwatches available by the end of this year.
Vidya Spandana didn’t aim low when she first started trying to make government more efficient. She took on the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Her creation, DMV.org—which took her college years and a good portion of her 20s—would have been far easier to create today. Sixteen years ago, there wasn't much focus on making public data publicly accessible with APIs, nor were there simple-to-deploy website solutions like WordPress. Spandana and her team built it all, from the ground up.
Her next project was a technically simpler, but far more dangerous. CrisisNET uses data scraped from crisis zones for first responders and journalists on the ground, allowing them to spend more time helping or getting the word out and less time collecting and parsing information. When CrisisNET revealed where Syrian rail bombers were most likely to strike and the analysis turned out to be as accurate as the CIA’s own intel, the world noticed.
Spandana, who served as a presidential innovation fellow in 2013, learned that people want the insight that her data collection methods and API produce, not the technology itself. So, she moved away from the nonprofit CrisisNet and earlier this year founded Popily, a cloud tool that analyzes data. In one example, a spreadsheet of information on Portland’s heritage trees reveals thousands of visualizations Popily thinks might be useful. Users can quickly sift through them to pick out options such as heritage trees by location, average size of each leaf, or ground covered by each tree’s shade.
Born in Visakhapatnam, India, Spandana knows life is about more than data, and that people are more than data points. “Staying connected to local people doing real life things…is a profound grounding piece to mental and emotional stability,” Spandana tells us. “The human side is just as important as the machine side.”
Spandana, who will be speaking at TFNW on how tech can be used to build a stronger democracy, says that participation in public services by private citizens is key. “Participation is critical because democracy is critical,” Spandana says, adding that her next project is a design school focused on inclusion, built for and by the design community in Portland.
Until then, Spandana will continue to do what she does most days, which is use Slack and text messaging to keep up with her Popily team, have fun making progress and moving forward in the world, and evangelizing tech literacy in diverse groups, especially minority and other under-represented populations.
Showgoers is a Chrome browser extension to synchronize your Netflix player with someone else so that you can co-watch the same movie on different computers with no hassle. Syncing up your player is as easy as sharing a URL.
Astronaut Scott Kelly has been providing us some spectacular images during his time in orbit, but this shot might be one of the coolest ones thus far: Venus, Earth, Jupiter and the Moon, all in the frame.
A Super PAC backing Democratic White House hopeful Hillary Clinton raised $15.6 million in the first six months of the year, according to a report filed on Friday with the Federal Elections Committee.
The Priorities USA Action’s haul was dwarfed by the record-shattering $103 million raised by Republican Jeb Bush. Still, the large sums of money given by a fairly small group of donors stand in contrast to the small-donor image Clinton has sought to cultivate for her campaign.
That image holds true for the campaign leg of her fundraising efforts. The contributions page for her campaign boasts of 38,775 receipts, most in amounts of $100 or less.
The contributions page for her Super PAC, however, almost reads like a billing for a big-budget Hollywood movie. Dreamworks Animations CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg gave $1 million; director Steven Spielberg donated $1 million; Saban Entertainment CEO Haim Saban and his wife, Cheryl, each gave $1 million. Five more million-dollar donations are also recorded on the filing.
In fact, of the mere 42 transactions listed since the beginning of the year, only six in the filing were for $1,000 or less.
While it is not unusual for the super wealthy to donate huge sums of money to candidates of various party affiliations, Clinton, the former secretary of State and Democratic frontrunner, has been a major proponent of campaign finance reform, often warning about corporations’ influence on the electoral process. She has also notably pushed for a return to public financing of campaigns and complained about the ever increasing length American election cycles.
Still, while Clinton has been vocal about her desire to reform the system of campaign financing, she has been careful to avoid specifically calling out big money itself as the issue, instead focusing on the source of donations.
“I want to ... fix our democracy by focusing on dark unaccountable money, which I think is corrupting our entire system,” Clinton said last month in Iowa.
Super Opinionated.
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