lthough the demand to defund the police may have had its specific origins in Minneapolis, Kaba understands that the growing curiosity about abolitionist politics is rooted in something much broader. She said, “People are frustrated by the way that the welfare state has completely been defunded. People don’t have what they need to survive. And yet the military and prisons keep getting more and more and more.” Contrary to the beliefs of their critics, abolitionists are not impervious to the realities of crime and violence. But they have a fundamental understanding that crime is a manifestation of social deprivation and the reverberating effects of racial discrimination, which locks poor and working-class communities of color out of schooling, meaningful jobs, and other means to keep up with the ever-escalating costs of life in the United States. These problems are not solved by armed agents of the state or by prisons, which sow the seeds of more poverty and alienation, while absorbing billions of dollars that might otherwise be spent on public welfare. The police and prisons aren’t solving these problems: they are a part of the problem.

But if Schmelzing is right, his chart simply tells the story of the technological maturity of capitalism. In the long run, as I argued in Postcapitalism, it means there are just not going to be rates of return to sustain an economic model based on markets and private ownership.

It should look to create a common language of care (a reverence for and a commitment to the astonishing fact of Being) through which it could begin to create alternative principles by which we might live. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in his famous essay “My Religion,” faith is not about obedience to church dogma, and it is not about “submission to established authority.” A people’s religion is “the principle by which they live.”

In accepting science as our primary weapon against environmental destruction, we have also had to accept science’s contempt for religion and the spiritual.

Our culture’s assumption that there is virtue in work flatters us into thinking that we’re doing something noble (“supporting our families,” “putting food on the table,” “making sacrifices”) when we are really only allowing ourselves to be treated like automatons. We all have our place, our “job,” and it is an ever less human place. We are diligent, disciplined, and responsible, but because of these virtues we are also thoughtless.

intellectual conscience.

A more adequate response to our true problems requires that we cease to be a society that believes that wealth is the accumulation of money (no matter how much of it we’re planning on “giving back” to nature), and begin to be a society that understands that “there is no wealth but life,” as John Ruskin put it. That is the full dimension and the full difficulty of our problem.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth may have distressing things to say about global warming, but subconsciously it is an extended apology for scientific rationality, the free market, and our utterly corrupted democracy.

The tragedy of the private, in short, doesn’t come from the private as individual, but from the private as ownership, as control over land, resources and others. To own was always less about protection of the self than it was about exclusion of others.

what information science and librarians have long known: data is always about the past and not the future; data is always an imperfect and biased record, encoding the values, beliefs, and ideas of its creators; and incorrect interpretations and uses of data harm people in unequal ways.4

In 2019, a study conducted by Stockholm University found that one of the only uniform impacts of climate change was on forecasting, which has become more difficult.

As the atmosphere has continued to warm, lofting ever more moisture into the air, it has also begun to expand, increasing the air’s capacity to absorb ever greater volumes of moisture, not unlike a gas tank that grows in size as you pump more gas into it. And because water produces heat as it condenses at altitude, the added moisture accelerates the process further. Based on the study’s local weather stations — one of which was erected on the farmer Lenardon’s land — Nesbitt knew that the atmosphere in the province was already demonstrating signs of this cycle, including spikes in evaporative moisture. But as he pointed out, moisture and heat are merely values of potential energy. They tell us that the sky, like our drying forests, is rapidly becoming an ocean of fuel, but they don’t tell us where and when it might ignite — much less what, exactly, might spark it.

Carbon intensive industries, and not poor populations, are the primary culprit of the climate crisis.

Performance Patterns

Essentially, we are encouraging a definition of openness as a process rather than a set of conditions that need to be met. It is an adaptive and dynamic process, and one that is always changing.

our students and early career researchers are the ones we need to work with. They have a different future to look forward to and I’m really pinning hope on the next generation – that they will create a different world.

“metadata” about our reading — broken spines, dog-eared chapters, marginalia.

Huff goes on to say that it is not enough to know simply that a certain tool is required. To have confidence in a tool, one must also know its history. What version of the tool is available? When was it released? What are its certifications? These are important questions. Confidence in the output of a package is based on confidence in the ingredients.

A Description of the Software Assembly Line

A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning

A Safety Net for Scientific Data

But the essence of his scientific legacy was his passion for doing things in a meticulous way. Itexplains why, even as challengers try to pick apart every other aspect of climate science, his half-century record of carbon dioxide measurements stands unchallenged

Data curation is critical for scientific data digitization, sharing, integration and utilization

The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer weighs the strength of the scientific evidence that some food, drink, pesticide, smokable plant, whatever is a carcinogen. What it does not do is consider how much that substance actually increases your risk for actually getting cancer—even if it differs by magnitudes of 100.

We propose linked open data as enabling a more interlinked and easily navigable scholarly environment that would permit: better integration of research materials with primary and secondary source objects and datasets; the potential to bridge but also address the specificities of the nomenclature, discourses, and methodologies of humanities disciplines and sub-disciplines; and the ability to respect institutional and individual investments in ownership or credit of resources by allowing for identifiable collections of data while fostering resource interlinking.

Science is not about certainty. Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking at the present level of knowledge. Science is extremely reliable; it’s not certain. In fact, not only is it not certain, but it’s the lack of certainty that grounds it. Scientific ideas are credible not because they are sure but because they’re the ones that have survived all the possible past critiques, and they’re the most credible because they were put on the table for everybody’s criticism.

the conceptual framework that I used in the 1990 paper, one that relies on partially excludable nonrival goods, is the bare minimum for answering them.