when the government executives are wrong.
-Voltaire
How Poetry Came to Matter Again
A young generation of artists is winning prizes, acclaim, and legions of readers while exploring identity in new ways.
‘Clarity and Undeniability’ Of UK Investigation Pinpointing Russian Poisoners ‘Amazing.’ “‘Every one of us in this room and listening around the world should be chilled to the bone with the findings of this investigation,’ says UN ambassador.”
Prosthetic Knowledge, the art/tech/computing blog, is done after nine years. Great site, thanks for all the info & entertainment over the years.
Learning to cope with man’s mortality is central to the teachings of the world’s major religions. However, very little is known about the impact of life-and-death trauma on religiosity. This study exploits a natural experiment in military deployments to estimate the causal effect of traumatic shocks on religiosity. We find that combat assignment is associated with a substantial increase in the probability that a serviceman subsequently attends religious services regularly and engages in private prayer. Combat-induced increases in religiosity are largest for enlisted servicemen, those under age 25, and servicemen wounded in combat. The physical and psychological burdens of war, as well as the presence of military chaplains in combat zones, emerge as possible mechanisms.
“Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel stated this summer that “when the generation that survived the war is no longer here, we’ll find out whether we have learned from history”. As a Polish Jew born in 1925, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, lost my family in the Holocaust, served in a special operations unit of the Polish underground, the Home Army, and fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, I know what it means to be at the sharp end of European history – and I fear that the battle to draw the right lessons from that time is in danger of being lost. Now 93 years old and living in Tel Aviv, I have watched from afar in recent years as armchair patriots in my native Poland have sought to exploit and manipulate the memories and experiences of my generation. They may think they are promoting “national dignity” or instilling “pride” in today’s young people, but in reality they are threatening to raise future generations in darkness, ignorant of the war’s complexity and doomed to repeat the mistakes for which we paid such a high price.”
After Equifax’s mega-breach, nothing changed
“Why it matters: A year ago Friday, Equifax — one of the major credit reporting agencies — announced that 145.5 million U.S. adults had their social security numbers stolen in an easily preventable breach. If any data breach was going to be able to shock Washington into enacting sweeping privacy reforms, this should have been it.
But that didn’t happen: “The initial interest that was implied by congressional actions didn’t pan out,” said Michelle Richardson, director of the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).
What was supposed to happen: After the first of several hearings involving Equifax, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Judiciary Committee, said it was “long past time” for federal standards for how companies like Equifax secure data.
- Data security wasn’t the only anticipated reform. Congress appeared poised to create a national breach notification law governing how and how quickly companies must notify anybody whose personal information is stolen in a breach. Currently, to the chagrin of national retailers, those laws vary state to state.
- Several investigations were supposed to penalize the credit bureau for lax cybersecurity, including failing to patch the vulnerability hackers exploited despite government warnings.
What actually happened: The bills petered out.
What went wrong:
What went wrong:
- “A lot of issues fall through cracks in the early days of an administration, especially one with so much controversy,” said CDT’s Richardson.
- Congress often has difficulty focusing on more than one cybersecurity-related topic at a time. Russia and election security are now in the spotlight.
- “Regulation is tough in this political climate,” said Tom Gann, chief public policy officer at McAfee.
- The cybersecurity field averages one “this-changes-everything” event a year, none of which actually changes everything. A year before Equifax, there were attacks on the election. In 2015, China hit the Office of Personnel Management. In 2014, North Korea hit Sony.
- “For people who think of themselves as privacy experts, they keep waiting for the straw that will break the camel’s back,” said Steven Weber, director of UC-Berkeley’s Center for Long Term Cybersecurity. “The fact is these don’t change the public’s view.”..
Following up on my previous posts (links below): LawProfBlawg, Legal Writing Professors: A Story Of A Hierarchy Within A Hierarchy:
Today’s
column is about a different type of hierarchy in academia. This column
is dedicated to some of the hard-working colleagues who go to faculty
meetings but don’t speak much, who do a lot of the thankless committee
work at many schools, and who spend more time with students than most
other law professors. The colleagues who, for the most part, don’t have
tenure, get paid a lot less, and in many schools often have smaller
offices away from their tenured companions. ...
Good
data exists about the structures afforded to legal writing professors,
because they actually take meaningful surveys with data. For the 2017
survey, only 21 percent of the legal writing professors described
themselves as being in traditional tenure or tenure track positions.
About 7 percent involve programmatic tenure. 
