A modest proposal by three U.S. Senators to relax federal laws on medical marijuana became a road map to legalizing weed. For a few days at least.
https://storify.com/PotReporter/historic-hype
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Mexican journalist fired, had revealed government scandals
During the weekend one of the Mexico’s most popular journalist had been fired. Trying to understand what was happening I made a Storify, it’s abailable here.
Joys of the rumor mill: Putin disappears. Netizens have a ball.
I wrote this week’s social media-oriented piece about the mysterious 10-day disappearance of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Given the speed and scale of the virtual outpouring of speculations about his whereabouts, the story seemed particularly fitting for social media curation. I used Martin Hawksey’s TAGS [Twitter Archive Google Spreadsheets] to scrape some Twitter API for statistics, read through various hashtag archives related to the topic during this past week, and to generate the network visualizations.
See the entry on Medium here.
Diversity in Tech sees lively discussion at SXSWi
Representation of women and people of color in Silicon Valley has long been cited as a serious problem, but this issue has in recent years been pushed to the center of conversations about technology and society. At this year’s SXSW Interactive, a four day technology conference in downtown Austin, TX, many sessions focussed on diversity in tech, creating spaces at the conference and online for participants to express both optimism and frustration with issues of opportunity and representation in technology.
The Kapor Center for Social Impact, an organization based in Oakland with a venture capital arm that supports work at the intersection of technology and social change, hosted a panel on Saturday called “Beyond the Diversity Data: Strategies That Work” as well as a $500 start-up pitch contest for “seed and pre-seed stage founders of color”.
Sitting on the panel was Lisa Lee, who leads diversity initiatives at Pandora. She addressed the need for a top-down approach to prioritizing diversity as a company. “It’s one thing to have a diversity recruiter reaching out to a group of people. It’s a totally different thing to have your CEO talk about diversity at a company meeting.”
Lee also pointed out geographical problems in recruiting engineers of color, citing that over 60% of black Americans don’t live in the Western region of the United States. “We now look at distance traveled in hiring.”
Echoing Lee’s argument, Makinde Adeagbo, an engineer and head of recruitment at Pinterest, described Silicon Valley’s diversity problem as more than just a pipeline issue that begins and ends in high school and college classrooms, in a session cheekily titled “How to Not Hire and Retain Employees of Color”, also on Saturday. “The number of black engineers in tech companies is still lower than the number of black engineers graduating from top schools.”
Ana Diaz-Hernandez from the Kapor Center also sat on the panel, calling out start-ups who emphasize “culture fit” as a culture of weak internal communication and “mirror-tocracy”.
Audience members jumped in with the panel on twitter with the hashtag “#moreofus. “Personally, I think “culture-fit” is made more complex than it should be, culture should always be evolving, not stagnant,” said Candace Queen, an Austin-based designer, responding to Hernandez.
Across many panels this weekend and scheduled for the coming days of the conference, attendees and speakers are challenging long-held ideas of what Silicon Valley culture looks like.
“Impressive , conference room full of tech savy latino entrepreneur women #latinoTech” tweeted @julianitaM.
The panel “Diversifying the Tech Workforce: Impact at Scale” generated a particularly lively discussion about the need for a culture change in tech. “We will navigate cultural differences to get code from halfway around the world but not from halfway across the city,” said Hank Williams, founder of Kloudco and Platform and a presenter on the panel. “The set of biases triggered by a white kid showing up in an interview in a hoodie is different than a minority kid.”
Jay Z admits to plagiarizing
Listen to the first 15 seconds of this music sample from 1978 by Swiss jazz and electronic musician Bruno Spoerri:
Now compare it to famous US rapper Jay Z’s song from 2013:
It makes you wonder what took Jay Z so long to admit to plagiarizing. News broke today that Jay Z finally agrees to pay Bruno Spoerri 50% royalties for using his music without permission. In this BBC interview from 2013 (YouTube, 8:03), Jay Z claims to have composed the song with his fellow musicians.
A musician from Los Angeles is happy about the news and calls Jay Z out on Twitter:
Good! Stop stealing other people’s music while calling yourselves GENIUSES. http://t.co/qayM0HmLnL
— Sandra Booker (@sandrabooker) March 13, 2015
The 79-year-old Swiss musician published a letter on Facebook his record company had sent to Jay Z’s management in 2014 saying that stealing music was not cool, particularly not by a rich musician. The letter concludes “shame on you, Jay Z, we expected more respect from you as a colleague to fellow musicians!” Spoerri says he was never in for the money but thinks that Jay Z should have asked. He added that getting his permission to use his 35 year old music sample would have been very cheap.
The story was widely shared and commented on on Twitter:
MMR Vaccine Actually Prevents Autism–By Preventing Congenital Rubella
In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet that has since been repeatedly and widely discredited, claiming that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism. No such thing is true. It later came to light that Wakefield had violated ethics in many ways and deliberately lied about the results, and The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010.
Unfortunately, much damage was already done, as thousands of parents had decided not to vaccinate their children. In recent years, measles epidemics have been making a comeback, especially in Europe, where the MMR autism scare was greatest. In 2011 alone, measles outbreaks in Europe sickened 26,000 people and killed nine.
The irony of all this is that the MMR vaccine has been preventing autism all along, by protecting pregnant women from rubella.
The rubella virus
Rubella—the virus putting the R in the MMR vaccine since 1971, when the combined vaccine was licensed—is not generally a fatal or even severe disease. Like the common cold, it is transmitted by airborne droplets. Patients can be contagious for a week before showing symptoms. In children, rubella can cause a fever, sore throat, and a rash of pink spots that spread from the face across the body. In adults, it may also cause headaches, pinkeye, and arthritis.
But the greatest danger is if a pregnant woman contracts rubella, especially during her first trimester. Rubella can cause congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) in the fetus. CRS is characterized by permanent birth defects, including hearing loss, cataracts, heart abnormalities, diabetes, liver damage, and autism.
A study led by Bryn Berger at Emory University estimated that, between 2001 and 2010 in the US alone, rubella vaccination prevented about 1200 cases of autism spectrum disorder. The study was published in the journal BMC Public Health in 2011.
Based on research in Jamaica and mathematical modeling in Norway and Australia, the researchers conservatively estimated that the incidence of CRS in the US without the rubella vaccination would be about 4 per 10,000 births. Taking that number and multiplying it by the number of births in the US from 2001 to 2010, they estimated that 16,600 cases of congenital rubella syndrome were prevented by rubella vaccination in the US just those 10 years.
Berger and his colleagues then used a 1971 study by Stella Chess that looked at 243 preschool children with CRS. This was just after a worldwide rubella epidemic from about 1963 to 1965—the US alone saw 12.5 million cases of rubella, about 11,000 babies who died after contracting the disease, and 20,000 children born with CRS. Chess’s study found that 7.4% of the 243 children with CRS had either full or partial autism.
If the rubella vaccine prevented 16,600 cases of CRS, and roughly 7.4% of those would have had autism, then the vaccine prevented autism in about 1,200 US children over ten years.
The authors of the study point out that by using Chess’s numbers for the percentage of CRS children who have autism, they are actually underestimating the number of autism cases being prevented, because the diagnostic criteria for autism have widened since 1971.
Rubella was declared eliminated in the US in 2004, and in the Americas in 2009, thanks to the rubella vaccine, first developed in 1969 by Maurice Hilleman and later improved into the form we use today by Stanley Plotkin.
But rubella has not yet been eliminated completely. Worldwide, about 100,000 babies are born with CRS each year. Even in the US and other places where rubella has been eliminated, people from areas where rubella still occurs can travel or immigrate here, bringing the virus with them. So women who are thinking of becoming pregnant are advised to get a rubella vaccination four weeks before pregnancy if they haven’t already been vaccinated or developed immunity. Once a woman is pregnant, the rubella vaccination is not recommended until after she gives birth.
Clearly not everyone who becomes pregnant has four weeks of advance warning to get a rubella vaccination. So what happens when all the kids who haven’t gotten the MMR vaccine grow up and begin getting pregnant?
Marijuana is not harmless
Roughly half of Americans now live in states with some form of legal pot, recreational or medical. As legalization spreads, teens perceive that pot is less and less risky. (Most high school seniors don’t think regular pot smoking is very harmful, with only 36% saying that regular use puts people at great risk compared to 52% five years ago.)
It’s true that most healthy adults — excluding pregnant women — can use pot occasionally or even regularly without serious health risks. But the same does not appear to be the case for young people whose brains are still developing into their 20s.
Pot is addictive. One-in-11 adult consumers exhibits symptoms of addiction; the rate appears higher for young people. (Though pot remains one of the least addictive commonly used drugs.) That means pot can take priority over responsibilities at home, school, work or with friends. Long-term users may want to cut back or quit, but they don’t always follow through, as they report irritability, sleeplessness, decreased appetite and anxiety.
Chart 1: Addiction rates of Marijuana compared to other substances (legal and illegal)
Pot, particularly strong pot, appears to contribute to psychotic episodes and schizophrenia. To be clear, there is not conclusive evidence that pot causes schizophrenia. But evidence of a link is mounting in observational studies. A recent British study bolstered the connection between stronger weed and psychosis, finding that people who smoked potent weed daily had five times the normal risk of suffering a serious psychotic episode; weekly users had triple the risk. The risks, though remain relatively small, on the order of 1-in-1,500 for young men who are heavy users.
Chart 2: Risk of first episode psychosis to cannabis users
Pot impairs memory and learning and may be linked to long-lasting cognitive impairment and IQ loss up to 8 points for heavy users who started in adolescence. (The latter part is perhaps the most concerning in pot science, but it is only correlational and subject to debate.)
And the potency of pot has increased in recent years (see 3rd chart). Frankly, no one knows what increased potency means for sure and savvy users can simply titrate to get their buzz by consuming less. But given the recent British study on strong weed and psychosis, this could be a significant risk factor for some.
Chart 3: Marijuana potency in the United States over time
Marijuana advocates, meanwhile, have stressed the drug’s safety, some going so far as to say pot is not harmful.
Steve DeAngelo, a well-known marijuana advocate recently tweeted: “Nobody with a brain seriously believes cannabis is harmful, Choomie.” (It’s not an entirely uncharacteristic statement from DeAngelo. He also recently tweeted, “Cannabis doesn’t hurt Intelligence but lying ‘scientists’ do.”)
Who is DeAngelo? He’s the CEO of the nation’s largest medical marijuana dispensary, one of the movement’s most visible activists, and 4th Most Influential Cannabis Business Executive, according to one list (the 1st three are not industry executives) http://www.stevedeangelo.com/cannabisbusinessexecutive-com-fortune-500-industry-today-cannabis-business-executive-100/
So while he often adopts a rebel’s stance, he is a businessman with a financial interest in promoting marijuana use and anti-science propaganda. The federal Department of Justice initiated in 2012 forfeiture proceedings against DeAngelo’s Harborside dispensary, which does $25 million a year in sales, on the grounds that it had grown too big.
Bob Young, Tomer Weller
Protected: Tsarnaev’s Case: Good Job VS Sensation Hunting
Have the last five years been a recovery or crisis?
This project was done in collaboration with Miguel Paz and Laurie Penny.
The issue that we chose to focus on was suggested by Laurie, who had a strong interest in the topic. We focused on the fallacies that the incumbent Conservative party in Britain have been stating in order to paint the last 5 years of their governance in a positive light as elections loom. We wanted to combat these statements by showing how policies enacted in the last several years have actually made many people’s lives worse off, except for those in the top percentages.
We wished to make the presentation interactive to allow users to take a part in shaping the information they receive, which may make them more receptive to the information that is presented. We also strove to frame the quiz at the outset in a neutral way. We added interactivity by building a quiz that asks the user about their circumstances. The answer to the question “Have the last five years been a recovery or crisis?” depends on the circumstances that a user puts in. We didn’t have time to completely finish the quiz as of this post, so many pertinent questions are currently omitted and the answers are only partially written. Ideally, we would also have a meta-analysis at the bottom that allows you to quickly see how your results compare to other people’s results.
The quiz is available here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/axz/quizlet/quiz.html
It is written using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The code is available here: https://github.com/amyxzhang/quizlet
The referendum that never was
In March 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, President Obama said something in a speech in Brussels that was perceived as untrue by Serbian media, but was not reported at all by US news outlets. The quote in the picture below was the basis for my attempt at debunking Obama’s claim. I used Canva to make a PDF: Kosovo -referendum-
