Pokémon Go Players Invent Fake Beaches on Real Maps to Catch Rare Wigletts. I’m embarrassed to understand that sentence.
Pokémon Go Players Invent Fake Beaches on Real Maps to Catch Rare Wigletts. I’m embarrassed to understand that sentence.
Many important points in this post by Jess Hill and Michael Salter:
In Australia, the current primary prevention strategy on gendered violence takes a universal approach. It does not put more resources into certain groups, but rather tries to deliver prevention work across the entire population. So entrenched is this ‘universal’ approach, it has come to stand as the exclusive definition of primary prevention.
But we are now coming up against the limitations of this approach. Even if we accept the current theory of change – that improvements to community attitudes will reduce gendered violence - it is clear, from the survey data we rely on to measure attitude change, that the strategy we have pursued for the past decade is showing limited, if any, success.
Flight of the Concorde? North Korea’s brief flirtation with supersonic airliners by Daniel Salisbury
Family Farms in NSW and Queensland promoted by Covid vaccine-sceptic group Parents With Questions were intended to operate outside a ‘corrupt’ food system. But not all has gone to plan - good piece by Ariel Bogle and Cameron Wilson
Some genuinely fascinating insights from Elle Griffin’s analysis of the filings in the 2022 antitrust case that blocked the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster:
The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
We might not need more blogs but we definitely don’t need more books.
No one buys books elysian.press
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Ready for take-off
This is pretty wild. Brazil has created a (massively underfunded) JSOC for the environment.
In 2013, Cabral secured approval to build a unit of rangers who were committed to saving the environment, by force if necessary. The next year, he was shot in the shoulder when he and his men surprised illegal loggers in the woods; he was back at work in less than two months.
The members of the G.E.F. (the acronym stands for Specialised Inspection Group in Portuguese) are biology nerds who found themselves carrying guns—a gang of jungle Ghostbusters. They undergo intensive training, developed by a specialized police unit that fights organized crime.
Most members of his team had graduate degrees in the sciences. Renato, a muscular man of thirty-four with a shaved head, had specialized in fish ecology. During raids, he did a lot of the heavy lifting, keeping up a cheerful patter as he destroyed mine equipment; other times he fixed engines. Alexandre, forty-eight and the father of two young girls, had worked in a national park and in fisheries regulation before taking the G.E.F. training course. “I’d never imagined working with weapons,” he said, but he had shown an unexpected aptitude. He was generally a guard, calmly scrutinizing the surrounding forest with a gun at his shoulder.
The only nonscientist was Marcus—a former lawyer, forty-two, tall and rangy, with an easygoing manner. At the headquarters, in Brasília, he procured weapons and ammunition for the group; in the field, he was often a guard. Growing up in the interior province of Goiás, he aspired to be a photographer for skate magazines, until his parents persuaded him to go to law school instead. Halfway through, he attended a ceremony of the União do Vegetal, a Christian sect that incorporates ayahuasca in its sacraments. “During the opening chant, I left my body,” he recalled. “I started to see the Amazon rain forest and found myself walking through it in a uniform with a team, while Indigenous people chanted behind me. That moment filled me with joy, and there I discovered the mission of my life.”
The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon newyorker.com
Reader: www.newyorker.com
I was interested in this speech by Ilona Kickbusch on the challenge of trying to create healthier societies during the polycrisis.
One of her slides jumped out at me, contrasting Goran Dahlgren and Margaret Whitehead’s longstanding model of the determinants of health with a cyclone:
This image has been central to public health messaging since the earliest stages of my career. Seeing it spun into chaos seems like an appropriate metaphor for the challenges that my field faces.
Ilona also quoted German Economics Minister Robert Habeck, who I think has it right:
“…when we live our everyday lives, when we fill up our cars, when we slather our mince on the mince roll, we are always on the side of the good guys. Only people who have never been in a pigsty can believe that. We are leaving a trail of devastation through the earth with our daily lives and we don’t care about it yet.“
Robert Habeck, 2022
This post originally appeared on the Harris-Roxas Health blog.
One of my infrequent reports from my endless quest for the perfect podcast episode.
How the hipster economy went mainstream - The Culture Journalist
⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
How a consumer aesthetic about “edge” without any semblance of ideology went mainstream.
The History of Drag - Betwixt The Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
The topic is so interesting it rises above the presenter’s irritating flourishes.
Segregated by Design - Architecture is Political
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
A fascinating description of how this plats out in the U.S.
Capitalists hate capitalism. All capitalists would rather extract rents than profits, because rents are insulated from competition. The merchants who sell on Jeff Bezos’s Amazon (or open a cafe in a landlord’s storefront, or license a foolish smartphone patent) bear all the risk. The landlords – of Amazon, the storefront, or the patent – get paid whether or not that risk pays off.
This is why Google, Apple and Samsung also have vast digital estates that they rent out to capitalists – everything from app stores to patent portfolios. They would much rather be in the business of renting things out to capitalists than competing with capitalists.
Security researchers agree, at least, that it’s unlikely that Jia Tan is a real person, or even one person working alone. Instead, it seems clear that the persona was the online embodiment of a new tactic from a new, well-organized organization—a tactic that nearly worked. That means we should expect to see Jia Tan return by other names: seemingly polite and enthusiastic contributors to open source projects, hiding a government’s secret intentions in their code commits.
The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind - WIRED
A interesting challenge to the notion of field epideimiology, drawing heavily on the lessons from a case in Ghana in 2011. The “field” is often seen as a frontier into which experts are parachuted:
Despite the mounting evidence suggesting it was not a zoonotic outbreak, more likely explanations for the outbreak, specifically that it had a toxic aetiology, went unexplored. After 2 years, all of the investigations into the outbreak had petered out. No meaningful public health interventions had taken place nor a compelling explanation for the event developed. However, if you read the draft and published manuscripts describing the outbreak authored by the investigators during that time, you would be left with the opposite impression…
Early on in the BAR outbreak response, a district disease control officer had raised concerns about introducing elite foreign and national outsiders into the investigation, warning: ‘They will come in, sit down and they will take this one, and this, and then they will come out with a nice story of a nice thing’. In an email to his fellow local outbreak responders, he explained that the outsiders will ‘want to publish because it is an emerging disease, however, there is the need for deeper investigation’ and that instead, they themselves should ‘work as hard as possible to answer all the possible questions, irrespective of the years or months that it will take’. Regardless of the image of transnational outbreak responders might have cultivated among themselves and the upper echelons of the larger epistemic community, to have such a reputation on the ground with those who witness work directly, is a damning indictment of these practices and their effectiveness.
The lessons from the editorial are that local workers get there faster and have the contextual expertise that is required for useful hypothesis generation.
It’s worth considering what other aspects of public health practice need to learn these lessons too.
Stuck in ‘the field’: why applied epidemiology needs to go home - BMJ Global Health editorial
More on the Brong-Ahafo case in this 2023 article by the same author.
“It is the result of deliberately hiding actual work – designing, making, sorting, packing, cooking, farming, delivering – behind little icons on your smartphone screen, in order to devalue it. It is the systematic use of the fake robot trick to lower the value of labour, until people are reportedly sleeping in tents at the factory gates, then banking the difference”
Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island nation’s reputation for aviation laxity. Now it was clear Boeing was responsible for all the deaths.
Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
Doctor does actually mean someone with a PhD, sorry going-medieval.com
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In Australia’s immigration detention centres, each detainee is given security risk ratings decided by an algorithm – but they’re not even told it exists.
Developed by Serco, the company tasked with running Australia’s immigration detention network, the Security Risk Assessment Tool – or SRAT – is meant to determine whether someone is low, medium, high or extreme risk for escape or violence.
Immigration insiders, advocates and detainees have told Guardian Australia the SRAT and similar tools used in Australia’s immigration system are “abusive”, “a blunt instrument” and “unscientific”. Multiple government reports have found that assessments can be littered with inaccuracies – with devastating consequences.