589 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2020
    1. Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk “bluelining,” and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in days past. This summer, climate-data analysts at the First Street Foundation released maps showing that 70% more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than previously thought; most of the underestimated risk was in low-income neighborhoods.

      Bluelining--a neologism I've not seen before, but it's roughly what one would expect.

    2. Jesse Keenan, an urban-planning and climate-change specialist then at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, who advises the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on market hazards from climate change. Keenan, who is now an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, had been in the news last year for projecting where people might move to — suggesting that Duluth, Minnesota, for instance, should brace for a coming real estate boom as climate migrants move north.

      Why can't we project additional places like this and begin investing in infrastructure and growth in those places?

    3. That’s what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn’t exist.

      This is an interesting and telling example.

    4. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed.

      Here's a place were those who cry capitalism will save us should be shouting the loudest!

    5. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot.

      We definitely need to quit putting good money after bad.

    6. Similar patterns are evident across the country. Census data shows us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters.

      And we wonder why there are climate deniers in the United States?

    1. Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic argues that prosperity theology contributed to the housing bubble that caused the late-2000s financial crisis. She maintains that prosperity churches heavily emphasized home ownership based on reliance on divine financial intervention that led to unwise choices based on actual financial ability.[36]

      This is a fascinating theory. I wonder how well it plays out for evidence?

  2. Aug 2020
  3. Jul 2020
  4. Jun 2020
  5. May 2020
    1. Van den Akker, O., Weston, S. J., Campbell, L., Chopik, W. J., Damian, R. I., Davis-Kean, P., Hall, A. N., Kosie, J. E., Kruse, E. T., Olsen, J., Ritchie, S. J., Valentine, K. D., van ’t Veer, A. E., & Bakker, M. (2019). Preregistration of secondary data analysis: A template and tutorial [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hvfmr

  6. Apr 2020
  7. Dec 2019
    1. "The replication crisis, if nothing else, has shown that productivity is not intrinsically valuable. Much of what psychology has produced has been shown, empirically, to be a waste of time, effort, and money. As Gibson put it: our gains are puny, our science ill-founded. As a subject, it is hard to see what it has to lose from a period of theoretical confrontation. The ultimate response to the replication crisis will determine whether this bout is postponed or not."

  8. Sep 2019
  9. Aug 2019
  10. Jul 2019
    1. Myth: Refugees are all Muslim.

      Do people actually think that? That is ridiculous and so ignorant. People shouldn't stereotype like that. Does the general public really believe that all refugees are from the middle east and are Muslim? I wonder if they know that there are thousands of Christians in the middle east."Christians now make up approximately 5% of the Middle Eastern population, down from 20% in the early 20th century" That's part of the problem. It's a war on freedom. Religious freedom, basic human rights, and personal desires. Sheesh!

  11. Jun 2019
    1. To keep recession away, the Federal Reserve lowered the Federal funds rate 11 times - from 6.5% in May 2000 to 1.75% in December 2001 - creating a flood of liquidity in the economy. Cheap money, once out of the bottle, always looks to be taken for a ride. It found easy prey in restless bankers—and even more restless borrowers who had no income, no job and no assets. These subprime borrowers wanted to realize their life's dream of acquiring a home. For them, holding the hands of a willing banker was a new ray of hope. More home loans, more home buyers, more appreciation in home prices. It wasn't long before things started to move just as the cheap money wanted them to.
  12. Apr 2019
    1. crisis. Its “creators,”

      I see crisis and creators close to each other in the text here and can't help but think about the neologism "crisis creators" as the thing we should be talking about instead of "crisis actors", a word that seems to have been created by exactly those "crisis creators"!

  13. Feb 2019
    1. “In spite of the high cost of rescuing the banks and the rising inequality across society revealed by the recession, the shrinking of the state has continued, led by the vain hope that markets will find a way of bringing a miraculous revival if left to themselves. History has shown that this is the wrong moment for that. Yet the current economic orthodoxy, incapable of explaining the crashes, holds on to an interpretation of how the economy functions that ignores the role of technology and the accumulated learning of the other social sciences. It has taken refuge in increasingly complex mathematical models, as if economics were more closely akin to physics. Worse still, these economists and many of their critics are still waging the ideological battles of the 1960s and 1980s, without realising that we are now in a completely different context—one that has more in common with the 1930s … If the advanced world governments stay on the current austerity path, they will wait forever for the market to do the right thing for growth and social well-being …

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    Annotators

    1. Structural adjustment and its results as another source of wealth transfers to US capitalists in the 1980s

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    Annotators

  14. Jan 2019
  15. wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
    1. Zack [42] distinguished these four termsaccording to two dimensions: the nature of what is being processed and the consti-tution of the processing problem.The nature of what is being processed is either information or frames of ref-erence. With information, we mean “observations that have been cognitively pro-cessed and punctuated into coherent messages” [42]. Frames of reference [4, p.108], on the other hand, are the interpretative frames which provide the context forcreating and understanding information. There can be situations in which there is alack of information or a frame of reference, or too much information or too manyframes of reference to process.

      Description of information processing challenges and breakdowns.

      Uncertainty -- not enough information

      Complexity -- too much information

      Ambiguity -- lack of clear meaning

      Equivocality -- multiple meanings

    2. Ta b l e 3DERMIS design premises [29]

      Muhren and Walle use the 6 of the 9 most relevant design premises for the future information system design guidelines for DERMIS, another crisis management system

      Information focus (dealing with complexity)

      Crisis memory (creating historical frames of reference)

      Exceptions as norms (support changing frames of reference in fluid, unpredictable scenario)

      Scope and nature of crisis (support adaptable management depending on type of crisis)

      Information validity and timeliness (synergy of coping with uncertainty and creating frames of reference from relevant, known information)

      Free exchange of information (synergy of social context and creating useful/sharable frames of reference)

    3. For our research design, we drew on Walsham [33] and Klein and Myers [13],who provide comprehensive guidelines on how to conduct interpretive case studyresearch in the IS domain.

      Bookmarked as a reminder to get these papers which could be helpful for the participatory design study.

    4. The problems of managing information and managing frames of reference are“tightly linked in a mutually interacting loop” and require “managing informationand the systems that provide it” [42]. IS have been generally designed to overcomethe information problems from Table 1. Most IS are aimed at either storing and re-trieving information to reduce uncertainty, such as database management systemsand document repositories, or at analyzing and processing large amounts of infor-mation to reduce complexity, such as decision support systems [31]. However, aswe have previously discussed, information related strategies are not always helpfulin coping with a variety of potential meanings.Problems of interpretation and the creation and management of frames of refer-ence, which aids Sensemaking, have generally not been taken into account whendesigning IS. Most IS currently seem tointend the opposite because they aim atreplacing or suppressing the possibility tomake sense of situations.

      Description of problem in integrating sensemaking (interpretive information process) into structured data systems.

      information =/= data

    5. there is scarce research on how IS can support informa-tion processing challenges—specifically related to Sensemaking—in crisis manage-ment [14]

      Muhren and Walle also state that there are "few studies that use Sensemaking as an analytical lens for the design of information technology."

    6. Sensemaking is about contextual rationality, built out of vaguequestions, muddy answers, and negotiated agreements that attempt to reduce ambi-guity and equivocality. The genesis of Sensemaking is a lack of fit between whatwe expect and what we encounter [40]. With Sensemaking, one does not look at thequestion of “which course of action should we choose?”, but instead at an earlierpoint in time where users are unsure whether there is even a decision to be made,with questions such as “what is going on here, and should I even be asking this ques-tion just now?” [40]. This shows that Sensemaking is used to overcome situationsof ambiguity. When there are too many interpretations of an event, people engagein Sensemaking too, to reduce equivocality.

      Definition of sensemaking and how the process interacts with ambiguity and equivocality in framing information.

      "Sensemaking is about coping with information processing challenges of ambiguity and equivocality by dealing with frames of reference."

    7. Decision making is traditionally viewed as a sequential process of problem classifi-cation and definition, alternative generation, alternative evaluation, and selection ofthe best course of action [26]. This process is about strategic rationality, aimed atreducing uncertainty [6, 36]. Uncertainty can be reduced through objective analysisbecause it consists of clear questions for which answers exist [5, 40]. Complex-ity can also be reduced by objective analysis, as it requires restricting or reducingfactual information and associated linkages [42]

      Definition of decision making and how this process interacts with uncertainty and complexity in information.

      "Decision making is about coping with information processing challenges of uncertainty and complexity by dealing with information"

    8. The central problem requiring Sensemaking ismostly that there are too many potential meanings, and so acquiring informationcan sometimes help but often is not needed. Instead, triangulating information [34],socializing and exchanging different points of view [20], and thinking back of pre-vious experiences to place the current situation into context, as the retrospectionproperty showed us, are a few strategies that are likely to be more successful forSensemaking.

      Strategies for sensemaking

    9. Just as the information processing challenges from Table 1 are not mutually ex-clusive, Sensemaking and decision making cannot be separated, but instead operatesimultaneously. Meaning must be established and then sufficiently negotiated priorto acting on information [42]: Sensemaking shapes events into decisions, and deci-sion making clarifies what is happening [40].

      Interaction between sensemaking and decision making

    10. Weick et al. [41, p. 419] formulate a gripping conclusion on what the sevenSensemaking properties are all about: “Taken together these properties suggest thatincreased skill at Sensemaking should occur when people are socialized to makedo, be resilient, treat constraints as self-imposed, strive for plausibility, keep show-ing up, use retrospect to get a sense of direction, and articulate descriptions thatenergize. These are micro-level actions. They are small actions. But they are smallactions with large consequences.”

      Description of how the seven properties interact to foster sensemaking.

    11. The seven different properties of Sensemaking can be captured by the acronym SIRCOPE: Social context, Identity construction, Retrospection, Cue extraction, Ongo-ing projects, Plausibility, and Enactment [17–21, 37–39]

      "Weick distinguishes between seven properties of Sensemaking"

    12. Crisis environments are characterized by various types of information problemsthat complicate the response, such as inaccurate, late, superficial, irrelevant, unreli-able, and conflicting information [30, 32]. This poses difficulties for actors to makesense of what is going on and to take appropriate action. Such issues of informationprocessing are a major challenge for the field of crisis management, both concep-tually and empirically [19].

      Description of information problems in crisis environments.

    13. We use the theory of Sensemaking to study exactly this: how people makesense of their environment, and how they give meaning to what is happening. Sense-making is a crucial process in crises, as the manner and thereby the success of howone deals with crucial events is determined by the grasp one has of a situation.

      Sensemaking frame used in this study relies on work by Weick, et al.

    1. This distinction enlightens the reading of thegrowing social media and mass emergency lit-erature for three reasons. First, without it, thisnew literature risks undoing decades of work bysocial scientists who have dismantled the mythsof disaster, with a dominant discourse thatincludes panic and unlawful behavior by victims.But in disasters arising from natural hazards, weknow such behaviors are not typical. Massemergencies arising from criminal behavior canhave a much wider range of collective behaviorbecause the source of the hazard is unknown,unpredictable and perhaps more imminentlydangerous

      Palen and Hughes raise concern about boundaries and classification in mass emergency research. They define crisis as an overarching term that incorrectly generalizes sociobehavioral phenomena during natural and criminal events.

    2. Misinforma-tion arising from natural hazards or exogenousevents might be greater in kind, but less inimpact, with fewer in-common readers as it tra-verses a network that can move a little slowerthan it might in criminal mass emergency events.Because the problem-solving tends to be morediffuse in exogenous events, the same messagemight not reach enough people; in other words,the misinformation might also be thinly diffused.Misinformation in such events is more likely toage out, or not be relevant to enough locations topose a big threat—in other words, all informationin thefirst place is less likely to be categoricallycorrect or incorrect, and as such, it is hard tofindas much value in pursuing the threat of misin-formation in such situations.

      Not sure I entriely agree with this argument that misinformation in natural disaster/exogenous events.

      Mis/Dis-information definitely matters for those affected. (see Neal, 1997 and Phillips work on phases of response for minority groups).

      What about misinformation campaigns during mass migration or other politically-tinged humanitarian crises where the exogenous factor (long-standing war, religious conflict/persecution, colonialism, etc.) is far removed from the immediate crisis? (Think 2015 migration crisis in Europe, Rohingya genocide in Myanmar implications for Bangaldesh).

      Is there a middle ground between endogenous and exogenous hazards?

    3. Wefindendogeneityandexogeneityof haz-ards to be a meaningful distinction in socialmedia in mass emergencies research, one thatreadily clarifies for a range of researchers andreaders who are outside the social science disci-pline. Just as events that arise from exogenousand endogenous hazards differently impact legal,political, health, and other societal systems, so dothey differently impact social media behavior.8With exogenous events, the culprit is beyondreach, and unstoppable. With endogenous agents,the suspect lies within. Therefore, organizingfeatures of the communication are distinctlydifferent, because the source(s) of the problem(s),the nature of their solutions,and the ability forthe perception of the collective control of theoutcomeare different. Online participation focu-ses on in-common salient problems when theyare present; when the problems are lessin-common and must be addressed in parallel, thecrowd organizes in many smaller groupings and,often endogeneity and exogeneity of hazardspredicts this (Palen & Anderson,2016).

      Describes differences in social media response between 2012 Hurricane Sandy (exogenous) and 2013 Boston Bombing (endogenous) mass emergencies.

    4. We make this point because we worrythat the very idea of“social media”flattens themany meanings of“crisis”and“emergency”forwhich social sciencefields have worked to pro-vide insight. For example, because Twitter orFacebook are available for use in any kind ofcrises, it is easy to make these applications thesalient concern, and ask“Is Twitter or Facebookbetter in emergency response?,”rather thanquestion how the very nature of emergencyresponse might beg for different forms of infor-mation seeking and reporting. We refer to thisflattening of communication medium and hazardas thesocial media and crisis confound.

      Definition of social media and crisis confound

    5. Research has demonstrated that data fromsocial media interactions can provide situationalawareness for specific crisis-related tasks anddomains. Using natural language processing (afield of study which enables computers to ana-lyze and understand the human language),machine learning (techniques that provide com-puters with the ability to learn), and crowd-sourcing (the process of accomplishing a task bydividing it into subtasks that can be performed bya large group of people), several research groupshave developed methods and tools for detectingand monitoring epidemics through social mediadata analysis (Brennan, Sadilek, & Kautz,2013;Chen, Hossain, Butler, Ramakrishnan, & Pra-kash,2016; Munro,2011; Olteanu, Vieweg, &Castillo,2015).

      bookmarked as a reminder to get these papers

    6. ubsequentresearch has focused on developing natural lan-guage processing classifiers that analyzes text tohelp identify tweets contributing to situationalawareness (Corvey, Verma, Vieweg, Palmer, &Martin,2012; Verma et al.,2011), though ingeneral the state-of-the-art of thefield is such thatautomation behind situational awareness deriva-tion is difficult to do dependably. Ireson (2009)assessed the extent to which public forum post-ings could add to situational awareness duringthe 2007floods around Sheffield, UK and foundextractable relevant event information despite theinconsistent quality and conversational nature ofthe posts.

      bookmarked as a reminder to get these papers

  16. Nov 2018
    1. Koh et al. (11) detailed a cycle of crisis care elaborating the nature of high medical costs, possibly resulting from fear and denial. First, an individual is in need of medical help, so he or she goes to a physician's office where the staff asks the individual to fill out a complex and confusing form. The physician examines the patient and explains the condition and treatment options using medical jargon. Numerous prescriptions, laboratory tests, and referrals are given without confirmation of the patient's comprehension. The staff sends the patient home with complicated instructions. Inevitably, the patient may consume medication incorrectly or miss follow-up appointments, and his or her condition worsens. Eventually, the patient presents to the emergency department, and the hospital staff develops a new treatment plan. Again, no one confirms the patient's understanding. When the patient is discharged, he or she is likely to get sick again and repeat the cycle (11)
  17. Oct 2018
    1. Do you admit to this certainty: that we are at a turning point? — If it is a certainty, then it is not a turning point. The fact of being part of the moment in which an epochal change (if there is one) comes about also takes hold of the certain knowledge that would wish to determine this change, making certainty as inappropriate as uncertainty. We are never less able to circumvent ourselves than at such a moment: the discreet force of the turning point is first and foremost that. — Maurice Blanchot

      Stiegler > Blanchot: "If it is a certainty, then it is not a turning point" ||

    2. The present time is caught up in a whirlwind in which decision making (krisis) has become increasingly numb, the mechanisms and tendencies of which remain obscure, and which must be made intelligible at the cost of a considerable effort of anamnesis as much as of meticulous attention to the complexity of what is taking place.

      Stiegler: "decision making (krisis) has become increasingly numb" ||

    1. It is therefore essential that Dasein should explicitly appropriate what has already been uncovered, defend it against semblance and disguise, and assure itself of its uncoveredness again and again. The uncovering of anything new is never done on the basis of having something completely hidden, but takes its departure rather from uncoveredness in the mode of semblance. Entities look as if… That is, they have, in a certain way, been uncovered already, and yet they are still disguised. Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery. Is it accidental that when the Greeks express themselves as to the essence of truth, they use a privative expression—ἀ-λήθεια? When Dasein so expresses itself, does not a primordial understanding of its own Being thus make itself known—the understanding (even if it is only pre-ontological) that Being-in-untruth makes up an essential characteristic of Being-in-the-world? The goddess of Truth who guides Parmenides, puts two pathways before him, one of uncovering, one of hiding; but this signifies nothing else than that Dasein is already both in the truth and in untruth. The way of uncovering is achieved only in κρίνειν λόγῳ—in distinguishing between these understandingly, and making one’s decision for the one rather than the other.xxxix H. 223 The existential-ontological condition for the fact that Being-in-the-world is characterized by ‘truth’ and ‘untruth’, lies in that state of Dasein’s Being which we have designated as thrown projection. This is something that is constitutive for the structure of care.

      Heidegger > Parmenides: the "two pathways" / "κρίνειν λόγῳ" || crisis as the distinguishing of the path

  18. Jul 2018
    1. Furthermore, and differentiating digital time from clock time, he suggests that a lack of adherence to chronological time is compounded by the fact that digital technologies connect with a flow of information that is al-ways and instantly available. He argues that continual change, which is bound up with web services such as social network sites, blogs and the news, is central to the experi-enced need for constant connectivity.

      Q: How does this idea of time vs information flow affect the data harvested during a digital crowdwork process in humanitarian emergencies?

      Q: How does this idea of time vs information flow manifest when the information flow is not chronological due to content throttling or algorithmic decisions on what content to deliver to a user?

  19. Dec 2017
    1. If the South Bronx were a state, it would have the second highest rate of drug overdose in the country after West Virginia.

      Wow! Very sad and disturbing.

  20. Nov 2017
    1. His doctor cut off his supply and urged Hale to enter a detox program. That didn’t work. Hale, still in agonizing pain and now suffering from intense withdrawal symptoms, returned to his doctor and pleaded to get back on his opioid regime. The doctor refused.
    1. representation of race and gender in our culture
    2. having students do a basic Google image search for terms like “doctor” “teacher” “baby”

      It may sound obvious but it actually works. Just did it with each of these three words (on DuckDuckGo) and the results, though unsurprising, bring home the point. Tried switching on the Canadian filter, to check if their might be a difference, and it mostly reorders the results, for some reason. Also tried “student” and “musician” which provide an interesting contrast. Doing this exercise in class, would probably start by asking learners to write down what they expect to get. (Might even do it in my applied anthro class, tomorrow.)

  21. Oct 2017
    1. Trump blindsides advisers with promised opioid plan Officials are scrambling to produce an emergency declaration by next week.
  22. Mar 2017
    1. Petro Canada

      The Canadian government established Petro-Canada as a state owned Crown Corporation to manage oil resources in the country. This decision was aided by a variety of international pressures, mainly the OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) embargo in which the oil rich Middle Eastern countries prohibited the sale of oil to the U.S., Canada, U.K., Netherlands, and Japan due to U.S. support of Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war. This oil embargo sparked a world shortage which spiked prices and caused Canada to look at moving towards more domestic sources of oil independence. With a new government, under the leadership of Trudeau, they adopted a more nationalist focus to their energy independence emphasizing the importance of Canadian industry. The Canadian government looked to reduce the influence of U.S. multinational oil companies in their own abundant oil fields in Alberta. Additionally, as a Crown Corporation, Petro-Canada was tasked to perform many tasks that wouldn’t be expected of privately owned companies. For example, the Canadian Government expected that Petro-Canada would explore the frontier for various, harder to access, resources like tar sands, heavy oil, or areas that would be difficult to develop transport chains. This charge from the state made it so Petro-Canada was more invested than private companies in exploring difficult to reach areas like the Mackenzie Delta in the mid 1970’s. The duties of the Crown Corporation were beyond simply providing energy for the nation, but also ensuring a sustainable future of energy independence.

      Annotation drawn from Fossum, John Erik. Oil, the State, and Federalism: The Rise and Demise of Petro-Canada as a Statist Impulse. Vol. 2. University of Toronto Press, 1997.

  23. Oct 2016
  24. Jan 2016
  25. Oct 2015
    1. The urban crisis that is affecting millions would then be prioritized over the needs of big investors and financiers.

      Would the affected "millions" have the power/force to go up against these "big investors and financiers" though?

  26. Feb 2015
    1. Ironically, the same colleague who has criticized Calle 24's recommendations, recently introduced similar development controls on what he calls "monster houses" being built in his own neighborhood. Free marketeers often try and stop poor communities from having a voice in development, but are happy to exchange their 'supply and demand' hat for a nimby hat when it comes to protecting their own backyard.

      This is true and needs to be called out.

    2. Federal HUD housing and state-funded affordable projects make up the majority of our affordable housing stock, with a smaller portion built using city dollars and fees on market-rate housing. Housing advocates have said for decades that if we don't prioritize building affordable housing on San Francisco's limited land we'll face a serious housing crisis. After years of deregulation and general apathy for building affordable housing, here we are.

      I think a lot of that stock was built when federal funding was higher. Now it's not. So what do we do?

      Also, what deregulation?

    3. Free marketeers are claiming that if we build enough luxury housing it will eventually trickle down and turn into housing for the poor and middle class. This is the failed policy of Reaganomics at its worst.

      The value of a unit depreciates with time (normalized for any trend in overall prices). That's a very different scenario than taxes.

    4. If the invisible hand of simple supply-side economics worked, then the overwhelming demand for affordability would lead developers to build housing that actually meets the needs of the majority of our residents. Unfortunately, affordable housing is difficult to build and sometimes more expensive to finance than high profit pied-à-terres and luxury apartments. In the last 7 years we've built over 23,000 luxury units, and only 1,200 units for middle class families.

      The issue with this paragraph is that it assumes regulation is not to blame for the high cost of affordable housing. It may well be the case that it is.