I think Pittsburgh and Cleveland are two ideal choices, for many of the same reasons. They both have strong tech pipelines at Case and CMU, affordable prime real estate, openness to offering incentives, and are are highly under-rated in terms of livability. Both have shown they can attract tech workers with options (CLE with its hospital system, Pitt with Google and others).They are both disadvantaged by the flight availability metric, but I think this could be induced by demand from Amazon.
A second tier Midwestern(ish) city could be a good option. Cleveland and Pittsburgh would be good choices, assuming the relocation induces more flight availability from CLE and PIT. Case and CMU produce a lot of tech grads, and Cleveland has been successful attracting medical professionals to relocate with its excellent hospital system. The housing stock, CoL, and cultural amenities are excellent. Pittsburgh already has a few bigtech connections and satellite offices. Columbus and Minneapolis would also fit the bill.
The civil rights era argument outlines a pretty solid meta-principle. Certain public accomodations should be open to all. I think this list should be limited, but a public service that effectively acts as a gateway to public speech could be argued to meet the criteria.
I think we're seeing an illustration of the point(also made during the civil rights era) that the cost of discriminating against a disliked minority can in fact be very low, so low that the market tolerates this inefficiency. Or perhaps it isn't irrational at all, as the market majority may indeed reward the discriminator for providing this non-monetary good.
I hope they find a provider, on principle.
I think the question of pets in public spaces is a bit of a culture-clash issue. I was raised with well-loved, well-trained dogs, but I would never have considered taking them to a grocery store or restaurant. There are a lot of people whose enjoyment of public spaces is impeded by the presence of animals - one person's emotional support animal is another's source of anxiety, and often for good reason.
I think it is reasonable to expect people to tolerate the broad spectrum of humanity encountered in public, including those at difficult developmental stages, but extending this tolerance to other species is a matter for debate.
Journalists may not be using the term bias in a statistically appropriate way, but they do seem to be capturing a colloquial sense of what bothers people about these models: the potential for the individual to be subsumed into his demographic, and the use of suspect classifications (like race in the US) as highly salient but 'silent' factors in the model. I don't think this is a misleading use of the term for the average reader, whom I suspect would consider the FICO redlining example as exhibiting 'bias' as the term is commonly understood by laypersons. The fact that these models are difficult to understand and interrogate for the average citizen is not exactly a point in their favor, since a lot of consensual governance is based on transparency and information symmetry, even at the expense of optimization/efficiency.
I would cheekily suggest that "American Woman" belongs on a "Quintessentially Canadian" playlist: the best-known song by a Canadian band, but focused on America.
I think that the media and Google itself did a horrible disservice to the memo author in mis-representing his words, and I'm fairly certain they did so on purpose and will continue to do so. However, to be charitable to googlers offended by the memo:
If the author asserted in the memo that Google practices discriminatory hiring practices ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" is the only relevant language I encountered), wouldn't that imply that some members of Group X currently employed at Google are less qualified than the members of Group Y who were discriminated against? Otherwise it would seem we are discussing a situation where tiebreaks tend to be decided in favor of the current minority group, or recruitment efforts for underrepresented groups are more intensive. The "lower the bar" phrase would seem to imply that he believes there are different standards in effect for selecting current employees.
The memo author's point about differing interest distributions does not necessarily imply anything about ability differences in the current Google employee pool, but claiming discriminatory hiring practices might.
For example, one of the specific complaints of the faculty at the time was that the advertised perk of on-site daycare was an extremely small number of places in the basement of a trailer on land not owned by the University (and so possibly subject to return to Cambridge). The environment at the time was tense, and the faculty appear to have opportunistically seized on the brouhaha to weaken a disliked leader. Many female faculty publicly supported the topic of the comments themselves (as I recall, the most vocal were an economist in favor and a very famous biologist against - the biologist appeared to interpret to the comments as a direct comment on the ability of the Harvard faculty)
I wish this Larry Summers martyr mythology would be revisited with scrutiny. Summers was already unpopular with the faculty for his changes to the core curriculum (it was argued that they reduced rigor in some tracks), endowment strategy, and a very strange scandal involving financial wrongdoing in Russia and a massive Harvard payout. He made his comments to a group including top female faculty during a time when they had made specific complaints concerning - among other things - severely family-unfriendly campus policies that disparately impact women. The faculty, many of whom were completely on board with the concept of sex differences in personality, saw his inartful "mama truck, daddy truck" comments as an attempted rebuttal. His comments - in this context - were pure toxoplasma, so of course they are what the media seized upon.
Good article. We want to incentivize researchers to share useful ideas in a timely manner, and allow others to trace the genealogy of these ideas to stimulate their thinking and avoid dead ends. A healthy citation culture helps to build the shoulders of giants.
Boxing was the football of the 1920s, with saturation radio and newspaper coverage, and became the top sport of the early broadcast TV era. It has been declared dead or dying at regular intervals despite being a solid performer into the pay-per-view era. Like football, it would probably be somewhat safer if its "protective" gear was reduced or redesigned.
It's a bit of a strange prediction. If we take boxing as a model of a formerly massively-popular sport now considered excessively dangerous, we can observe that minority (Latino and African-American) participation remains high. These demographics are generally not considered part of the Red Tribe coalition. If football follows the same trend, it will be a weak tribal correlate at best.
That is possible because the generation time of many bacteria can be measured in hours or minutes. The generation time in humans is ~25 years (possibly a bit higher in the western countries mentioned) So there could be hundreds of bacterial generations in a few days, but only ~2 human generations in the time period covered by this study. Selection would have to be extremely strong (the strongest ever observed by far) for the sperm count decrease to be primarily related to selection.
"second-hand social media" is a brilliant coinage. it's perfect to describe non-users who are still affected by shadow profiles, ubiquitous logins and trackers, the walling-off of some discourse, and facial recognition capture.
This is the impression I have reading reportage from writers like Chris Arnade, where it seems like the poor and the majority of those writing about them are speaking at cross-purposes (not Arnade, but others in the genre of 'explaining the left-behinds'). I have heard that a similar argument is made in the book Seeing Like a State, which I have put on my reading list.
If I'm reading Pica correctly, it seems like you two are talking about different things: Pica is referring to the scaffolding of values (social norms including high trust) and practice (proving services to community members) that 'rural/low income' communities value, and which invisibly support the modern economy on the local scale. Tullius seems to be referring to the economic and technological goods provided by the modern marketplace, which do indeed subsidize rural areas.
I don't think the rural zones actually worship the free market, and that is part of the problem they have communicating their values to the economically successful, who tend to prefer arguments couched in terms of economic benefits rather than the vague social goods (low social friction, multiple status hierarchies, respect for religion, etc.) desired by the rural/traditional communities.
Perhaps these lipstick-wearing women were raised in a social environment where a previously supernormal stimulus (heightened lip pigmentation/smoothed glossy lip surface) is now expected as a normal aspect of professional presentation in many contexts, and they do not wish to be asked "are you feeling well?" on a regular basis.
There are very few genetic risk score models that outperform traditional observational disease markers (here[1] is a non-paywalled discussion of cardiovascular GRS performance as an example). The best GRS results tend to be in relatively genetically-homogeneous populations that are similar to the population in which the GRS model was developed. In some cases, knowing the ethnicity or simple family history of a patient can buy you a good portion of the AUC of the relevant GRS.
So if you have a classifier like ZIP, that (1) epidemiologists have done a bit of legwork correlating to classical markers like obesity (or their correlates, such as income and dietary/smoking/prescription patterns) and (2) tends to follow familial/ethnicity clusters in (3) a heterogeneous population, you can amass a fair bit of predictive power on the cheap for complex disorders where environmental variance plays a role, as well as beating the spread on behaviourally-determined mortality/morbidity factors.
It is likely that the predictive power of GRS-based approaches will improve for many conditions in the future (they are of course already powerful for Mendelian disorders).
At present, the claim made in the article is not as controversial within public health as it may seem: zip codes are a better predictor of many health outcomes, including life expectancy, than our present genome-based predictive models. The public tends to over-estimate the predictive value of polygenic risk scores, especially for complex conditions like metabolic syndrome. Zip codes capture a great deal of environmental variance, plus a bit of genetic clustering by shared ancestry. Most polygenic models fail to capture all of the relevant genetic variance, and are uninformative about environmental factors. Additionally, for some conditions, the magnitude of environmental variance and relative importance of environmental factors is greater than the variance and effect size of genetic factors.
The trajectory of eugenic dog breeding is not one I would wish on my own species.
https://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/100-year...
It's sobering that the problem lies less in methodology, but in the caprices of the breeders. Even modern molecular techniques are susceptible to the problem of goal alignment.
"All men are created equal..." is certainly not invalidated, but what was intended to be indisputably true is rendered debatable, since Jefferson obviously countenanced exceptions.
One of the many horrible and unsettling realities of American slavery was the not-insignificant number of occasions in which slaveholders sold their own children into slavery.
Maybe it's an artifact of this interview format, but the researcher's conclusions seem a bit undersupported. For example, given the fact that male-male erotica is very common in fanfiction, a female-dominated activity, it would not surprise me if the "excess" gay porn was consumed by straight women, a demographic that we know is attracted to males.
I think people fear that the heavy hand of the state - or employers wielding powerful economic incentives - will come down on alcohol as it did on tobacco. Once something is declared "unhealthy" there is strong pressure to eliminate it, as health and productivity are the twin goods of modern society. I'm a nonsmoker, but I feel for that group of smokers (mostly pipe and cigar afficionados) that have had one of their major pleasures curtailed.
She did not deceive him or collude with others to exert undue leverage over him. She made it clear that the intended result of the actions she advocated was death. She does not appear to have introduced the idea of suicide in the first place. She had no legal, physical, or economic control over him, was not in proximity to him during the suicide, and does not appear to have involved third parties at any time. He carried out an act that was legal for him to perform in large part because of her persuasive speech. Her words were chilling, but his act was the result of speech between two peers, and was not itself illegal.
But suicide is not illegal in Mass.,so she is not an accomplice to any crime. She did not give any material or physical aid to help the victim effect his death, so it's hard to stretch this as assisted suicide, the closest related criminal charge (and it seems the prosecutor agrees as they charged her with manslaughter).
Desiring someone else's esteem or romantic affection should not be considered sufficient to make you their mindless thrall in the eyes of the law. The defendant was a juvenile peer with no legal, physical, familial, or economic control over the victim. She was just a horrible person he found attractive and persuasive.