Source: Privacy Tools | Julia Angwin
In the course of writing my book, Dragnet Nation, I tried various strategies to protect my privacy. In this series of book excerpts and adaptations, I distill the lessons from my privacy experiments into tips for readers.
“If we are to sustain the solidarity that encourages acceptance of the strains of democratic cooperation, we must learn to more fully appreciate those contexts in which our common humanity is more important than our differences, by admitting that it is often possible to recognize and respect the moral integrity of others even when we disagree with them about matters of moral and political significance.”
“The sacrifices and compromises that matter are not just those associated with the demands of war or other national crises. We must learn, for instance, to relinquish resentments towards the ‘opposition’ when we lose out in a political contest and to refrain from smug self-righteousness when we win.
We must encourage our political leaders to be open to constructive compromise when political consensus is out of reach. We must also be more willing to tolerate the public expression of attitudes with which we disagree, and we must accept that even the best-designed legal institutions and practices may yield decisions which many believe to be mistaken. Democratic cooperation will always produce what John Rawls called the “strains of commitment,” and our continued flourishing as a democracy depends upon a readiness to acknowledge and accept these strains.”
— Michele Moody-Adams, a professor of political philosophy and legal theory at Columbia University
Source: How to Reawaken a Sense of Solidarity in America – The Atlantic
More positive/optimistic results surrounding the potential for calorie restriction (CR) diets to increase healthspan and lifespan.
Source: BBC – Future – The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less
“this [the Calerie trial] is the first study of its kind, and I don’t think that any of us would feel confident in saying, ‘okay, we’re going to recommend this to everyone in the world,’” says Roberts. “But it’s a really exciting prospect. I think that delaying the progression of chronic diseases is something that everyone can get behind and get excited about, because nobody wants to live life with one of those.”
Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal” came of age last year. I’m now teaching students younger than Stevan’s proposal, and yet, very little has actually changed in these 21 years.
Source: bjoern.brembs.blog » Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience, by Björn Brembs
we are currently spending about US$ 10b annually on legacy publishers, when we could publish fully open access for about US$200m per year if we only were to switch publishing to, e.g. SciELO, or any other such system. In fact, I’d argue that the tax payer has the right to demand that we use their tax funds only for the least expensive publishing option.
While many of the consequences of wasting these infrastructure funds on publishers have become apparent only more recently, the indefensibility of ever-increasing subscription pricing in a time of record-low publishing costs, was already apparent 20 years ago. Hence, already in 1994, it became obvious that one way of freeing ourselves from the subscription-shackles was to make the entire scholarly literature available online, free to read. Collectively, these two decade-long concerted efforts of the global OA community, to wrestle the knowledge of the world from the hands of the publishers, one article at a time, has resulted in about 27 million (24%) of about 114 million English-language articles becoming publicly accessible by 2014. Since then, one single woman has managed to make a whopping 48 million paywalled articles publicly accessible. In terms of making the knowledge of the world available to the people who are the rightful owners, this woman, Alexandra Elbakyan, has single-handedly been more successful than all OA advocates and activists over the last 20 years combined.
RE: Sci-Hub
For reference consideration, Wikipedia has about 5.4 million content pages in English (2017-06) and has an annual budget on the order of $60 million.
Not all calories are equal.
Source: Why the calorie is broken — Quartz
Differences in height, body fat, liver size, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and other factors influence the energy required to maintain the body’s basic functions. Between two people of the same sex, weight and age, this number may differ by up to 600 calories a day
The microbes in our intestines digest some of the tough or fibrous matter that our stomachs cannot break down, releasing a flow of additional calories in the process. But different species and strains of microbes vary in how effective they are at releasing those extra calories, as well as how generously they share them with their host human.
None of this means that the calorie is a useless concept. Inaccurate as they are, calorie counts remain a helpful guide to relative energy values: standing burns more calories than sitting; cookies contain more calories than spinach. … This is a new challenge, and it is likely to require a new metric. One option is to focus on something other than energy intake. Like satiety, for instance. … Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, has his own calorie upgrade: a nutrient density score. This system ranks food in terms of nutrition per calorie, rather than simply overall caloric value.