For everyone interested in taking MAS.700, welcome! There’s been a lot of interest in the class this year – one wonders why, as there’s nothing going on in the outside world that makes news particularly interesting or important. I am going to assume that people have simply heard that I’m a style icon and are attending to see my radical and provocative fashion choices.

If you’re interested in the spring 2017 edition of MAS.700, here are a few things to know:

– You must come to the first class. It’s from 1-4pm on February 8, in E15-341. (This first class will probably go only 2 hours, but most will be closer to 3 hours with a break.) I will try to accommodate everyone, but there are constraints having to do with the size of the room and the number of assignments I can read each week.

– There is no passive auditing of any of my classes. You’re welcome to participate as an auditor, but I expect you to do the work that any student taking the course for credit would do.

– It doesn’t matter what university you’re from. I’m thrilled to have MIT students – Media Lab, CMS or otherwise – in this class, but I’m equally thrilled to have participants from anywhere in the greater University of Boston. If you’re affiliated with a university somewhere within driving radius of Cambridge, you’re welcome here.

– If I have to limit the size of the class, I will make decisions based on balancing skill sets. This class works best when I have roughly equal numbers of engineers, designers and journalists, plus a few wild cards.

– The syllabus is in flux. I am making some changes today, and will likely keep adding readings as the semester goes on as this is a really fascinating moment in time and some great writing is taking place.

– Most students find that this course requires more work than they expect. There’s three hours of classes a week, and reading will likely take you another 2-3 hours. There’s an assignment virtually every week, and those tend to take a minimum of 4 hours to complete. If that’s going to be a problem for you, please give your seat to someone else who wants it.

Looking forward to meeting lots of folks on Wednesday the 8th.

Below is a mockup of a concept I’ve had for a while called NewsMap*, which is a way of curating and annotating the news by storing news stories in a personal categorized dashboard.

NewsMap would allow people to process the news in a more coherent manner, as opposed to jumping from headline to headline, day to day. For example, if someone is interested in MOOCs, they can store an interesting article about MOOCs in the Ed Tech folder on their NewsMap dashboard. Two weeks later, when there’s another front page article about MOOCs, they can drag and drop it to that same folder, and compare the two stories and start to build a narrative of who the players are, what the trends are, etc air max sale.

NewsMap would galvanize people to action through first and foremost supporting their intellectual curiosity and helping them make connections between related news stories (as well as information on the web that isn’t necessarily categorized as “news,” such as organizations, campaigns, emails, and blog posts). Their dashboard would become a visual representation of the connections they make between research, policy, and practice original new balance.

In the long term, this concept is something I plan to integrate into my school mapping project.

Always looking for feedback and assistance 🙂

Thanks,

Julia

*I am aware that the name NewsMap is already taken.

 
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A few weeks ago a friend of mine shared this image that a friend of hers had originally posted to Facebook.  The image was not linked to an article and did not cite a source (I have since found that it came from The Sun.  The image sent me down a rabbit hole learning about whale beachings (there have been two large ones since the start of the year one of a pod of sperm whale in the North Sea and the other of a pod of pilot whales of the coast of India.

Some articles posed theories about how and why these animals were beaching  but most said there were no conclusive reasons cited yet.  It seems that it conducting complete narcopsies for whales is timely and expensive.  The reports for 21 pilot whales beached in Scotland in 2013 were just released in the end of 2015.  That report supported the most likely theory that I had read among the different articles: that the whales had ingested so much mercury over their life times that it had damaged their ability to navigate the waters and resulted in their fatal disorientation.  Most papers reported that sperm whales beached in the North Sea had gotten lost in shallow waters looking for a giant squid and noted that this is often thought to be the reason that whales beach: they get lost in shallow waters and then can not get out or can not find food and die before reaching the shore.

But I wondered why the whales were getting lost and if they were getting lost more often then before.  Wikipedia offered a listing of all the reported beachings of sperm whales since the mid 1700’s but when i graphed this data it seemed erratic.  Then I decided to graph all the reported mass beachings of pilot whales and the steady increase was much more evident.  I dropped the sperm whales from the exercise and decided to focus my data on the pilot whales.

The studies are still inconclusive that increased mercury levels cause neurological damage and disorientation specifically in whales but this damage has been proven conclusively in other high order mammals and one article in National Geographic cited the study of the pilot whales and referenced the possible link between the toxins and the beachings.

As further context I visited the New Bedford Whaling Museum as part of my research and had a nice time talking for a few hours to a docent there.  The museum seemed to target elementary school programs and I think a bit of that aesthetic seemed into my video!

The map that appears in the video is originally from this site.

Last fall, I scraped and cleaned data for the more than 21,000 nominations submitted for Nobel Prizes between 1901 and 1966 — the only years for which data were publicly available. For each nomination, the database contains the names of both the nominator and the nominee, along with such information as their gender, hometown, birth year, death year, and profession.

Some surprising factoids began to jump out at me as I looked over the data. I thought I’d tell the story of one of them for this assignment, .

To see the story, download the zip from www.github.com/aguynamedashley/partnews and open index.html in your browser.

I looked at OECD data for gender-related tables, and found an interesting one on women inventors. Data was gleaned from patent records, detailing the names of people involved in the inventions (“the inventors”) sorting those lists by country-specific common male and female names (which probably means there are slip ups in either direction).
I have tried many different tools, and the most useful were Quartz Chartbuilder for simple graphs, CartoDB for maps and DataHero for all the rest.
First I made a map of the data. I found it interesting that such high concentrations of women inventors were found in Poland and Portugal, as well as Mexico, Greece and Chile.

Then I charted differences over time for some countries (Because I couldn’t fit them all in). As you can see, all featured countries have seen peaks which later declined. For Australia and Finland the decline seems to be ongoing, while Greece, Israel and Chile have seen a modest uptick, and the US pretty much flatlined.

Last, I wanted to see if I could find some interesting relationship between women inventors and other indices. Was there a correlation between the percentage of women inventors in a country, and the percentage of women who received tertiary education in that country?

Yes, there does seem to be a strong correlation between the two. A more educated women populace would mean more women inventors.

What about women entrepreneurs – was there a possible correlation there?

There does seem to be a modest correlation between the two.

But I was most surprised when I tried to correlate gender wage gap – often used to describe the level of gender parity in a country – with women inventors. I had expected for the connection to be inverse: the lower the wage gap, the higher the opportunities a woman has to become an inventor. But it was the other way around, at least in the countries I checked: Denmark had a low wage gap – and a low rate of women inventors, while Chile displayed the opposite connection. Whether this is the result of a cultural difference of something else  – or maybe my chart didn’t portray the situation entirely accurately – I don’t know. But it leaves some interesting questions to investigate.

An exploration of different Boston neighborhoods, median property values, and racial demographics. 

This week GE officially moved its headquarters to Boston.  Many media outlets covered the event with some emphasizing the donation that the company will give to to city, others covering the tax incentive that GE will receive by making the move and others talking about the bridge that the city will pay to rebuild as part of their agreement with GE.

I first heard of the story two weeks ago at a meeting for the Coalition for the Homeless.  The group mentioned that the city has agreed to pay for the bridge for to address traffic flow in response to an anticipated increased usage as a result of the company’s move.  This news shocked me since the city had recently closed the Long Island Bridge and made no efforts to repair or rebuild it.  The Coalition for the homeless were not just upset about the bridge but also about the $150 million in tax breaks that the city and state have agreed to give GE.

For this video I wanted to play with creating voiceover though I found it to be challenging.  Though I knew of the protest I was unable to make it this week, however in putting together the video I had wished that I had been able to attend the event myself and record.

Footage of the protest is filmed by Tayla Andre and the final image of the postcard from a homeless person to Marty Walsh following the closure of Long Island is from an article by the Boston Globe.

…Where Do I Steer My Boat?

Those who saw The Big Short may have noticed that Christian Bale’s character – real life hedge fund manager Michael Burry – moved from examining the housing market to water. Coincidence? Probably not. If one of the few guys who saw the financial crisis coming now builds his portfolio around this scarce commodity, it’s time to ask a few questions.

The biggest water-related headline these days is Flint, Michigan. It may seem like a leap to go from the abstractions of Wall Street to the very real fears of Flint parents. Yet the essential nature of water relies on our ability to access it. And although Flint is an extreme case, it is not an isolated incident. In Jackson, Mississippi, health officials have advised children and pregnant women to stop drinking tap water. From DC to Chicago, Providence to Greenville, aging infrastructure has led to contaminated drinking water quite a few times over the years.

Any hazardous lead level is, well, hazardous. Approximately 6.5 million lead pipes – many reaching the critical 95-year mark – are still in use. (Remarkably, this a relatively low proportion – though significant, especially when concentrated in single locales.) If this concerns you, you are probably not so keen to rely on the charity of Beyoncé or Cher (or Diddy or Wahlberg) after the fact, no matter how generous or appreciated their donations have been.

There is some movement at the national level to find the funds to start making infrastructure changes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also has some information to learn more about the science, regulations, and what to do in your own home. The CDC also has a Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program that has been looking into the issue for decades. Or you might prefer to take a local approach – many states have an agency that addresses these issues, such as Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

We might also learn something from our neighbors to the north. Back in 2010, Toronto looked into replacing lead pipes in the city – and some research conducted at Virginia Tech University that demonstrated replacing only part of the pipe would not resolve contamination issues. In fact, civil engineer Charles Marohn suggests that building a new system might be more cost effective than replacing the old ones.

But at the end of the day, you ought not to worry alone. Let us help you talk to your neighbors that are having the same thoughts you are – compare notes, reach out to the right officials, and find out what actions you need to take next. Who knows, you might be able to enjoy your water free of concern, but if not, you will have a whole community behind you.

Note: Obviously, the above is just a hypothetical template – to go with the sample “solutions” approach to the water crisis story – that someone with more programming skills than me might turn into a real mechanism to organize people around issues of shared concern.