I don't know you,
But I love you,
Just as God loves me and you.
The sun and the moon
Are opposing forces,
But they still greet each other,
Peacefully,
As one awakens in the morning,
Just as the other goes to sleep.
Life has pounded me down
And thrashed me around,
Time and time again,
But I always get right back up,
Because I still love life -
Just as the earth still loves
The rain.”
― Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Top-Secret UFO Files Could ‘Gravely Damage’ US National Security if Released, Navy Says Live Science
Three Coyotes Fail to Impress Unfazed Cat Named Max in This Showdown Time
How the Ginkgo biloba achieves near-immortality Science Magazine
The world’s 500 wealthiest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index added $1.2 trillion, boosting their collective net worth 25% to $5.9 trillion.
Only eating 'one steamed bun per day', a Chinese student dies after suffering severe malnutrition
The sudden death of 24-year-old student Wu Huayan, who was trying to save money to help her sick brother, sparks nationwide outrage over whether more could have been done to save her.
'They've been completely gutted': Is the end of political cartoons nigh?
Through satire and irony, political cartoonists wield great power. But facing greater censorship and struggling to make money in an online world, many say the future is looking "absolutely dire".
A PROMISING START TO A CAREER: 17-year-old high school student discovers rare new planet 3 days into NASA internship
Inspired by a trip to Venice, the world’s most prominent example of what life could be like in many of our coastal cities in the years to come, Hayden Williams made a series of 3D rendered images showing what our world might look like underwater
How the oil industry has spent billions to control the climate change conversation Guardian
Australia, where lies and conspiracy theories spread like bushfire Guardian
The Wild Wild West of Data Hoarding in the Federal Government
Active Navigation: “There is a strong belief, both in the public and private sector, that the worst thing you can do with a piece of data is to delete it. The government stores all sorts of data, from traffic logs to home ownership statistics. Data is obviously incredibly important to the Federal Government – but storing large amounts of it poses significant compliance and security risks – especially with the rise of Nation State hackers. As the risk of being breached continues to rise, why is the government not tackling their data storage problem head on?..”
We've built the battery of the future out of a common element. Click to open in new tab.
As society moves away from fossil
fuels, we will need more radical new technologies for storing energy to
support renewable electricity generation, electric vehicle
Winners Take All is Anand Giridharadas’ 2018 book about how “the global elite’s efforts to ‘change the world’ preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve”. For instance, Giridharadas would argue that Jeff Bezos donating a billion dollars to charter schools while Amazon pays no federal income tax is a problem.
Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? His groundbreaking investigation has already forced a great, sorely needed reckoning among the world’s wealthiest and those they hover above, and it points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world — a call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.
The RSA made an animated video of a talk by Giridharadas that distills his central message into about five minutes — it’s a good watch/listen. The full talk is available here. (via aeon)
Against cheerfulness
The tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house.
To surface from dreams in a bed, burrowed beneath blankets and comforters,
the change of state from cold to warm is all that matters, and you think
just one more minute snuggled here before you face the chill. Just one.
Science: “Academic journals in Russia are retracting more than 800 papers following a probe into unethical publication practices by a commission appointed by the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). The moves come in the wake of several other queries suggesting the vast Russian scientific literature is riddled with plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and so-called gift authorship, in which academics become a co-author without having contributed any work. The RAS commission’s preliminary report documenting the problems and journals’ responses to them is “a bombshell,” says Gerson Sher, a former staffer at the U.S. National Science Foundation and the author of a recent book on U.S.-Russia science cooperation. The report, released yesterday, “will reinforce the suspicions and fears of many—that their country is not going down the right path in science and that it’s damaging its own reputation,” says Sher, who applauds RAS for commissioning the investigation…”
What to think of "near death experiences"? — John Martin Fischer (UCR) in a lively video interview
What You Need to Be Warm: Neil Gaiman Reads His Humanistic Poem for Refugees, Composed from a Thousand Definitions of Warmth from Around the World
“Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place, to hold out a badly-knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say we have the right to be here, to make us warm in the coldest season.”
The tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house.
To surface from dreams in a bed, burrowed beneath blankets and comforters,
the change of state from cold to warm is all that matters, and you think
just one more minute snuggled here before you face the chill. Just one.
Places we slept as children: they warm us in the memory.
We travel to an inside from the outside. To the orange flames of the fireplace
or the wood burning in the stove. Breath-ice on the inside of windows,
to be scratched off with a fingernail, melted with a whole hand.
We travel to an inside from the outside. To the orange flames of the fireplace
or the wood burning in the stove. Breath-ice on the inside of windows,
to be scratched off with a fingernail, melted with a whole hand.
Science: “Academic journals in Russia are retracting more than 800 papers following a probe into unethical publication practices by a commission appointed by the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). The moves come in the wake of several other queries suggesting the vast Russian scientific literature is riddled with plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and so-called gift authorship, in which academics become a co-author without having contributed any work. The RAS commission’s preliminary report documenting the problems and journals’ responses to them is “a bombshell,” says Gerson Sher, a former staffer at the U.S. National Science Foundation and the author of a recent book on U.S.-Russia science cooperation. The report, released yesterday, “will reinforce the suspicions and fears of many—that their country is not going down the right path in science and that it’s damaging its own reputation,” says Sher, who applauds RAS for commissioning the investigation…”
What to think of "near death experiences"? — John Martin Fischer (UCR) in a lively video interview
Yehonatan Givati (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Theories of Tax Deductions: Income Measurement versus Efficiency, 5 NYU J.L. Fin. & Accounting ___ (2020):
What is the purpose of tax deductions? A common view among tax law scholars is that tax deductions are required to properly measure income. I present an alternative theory of tax deductions, relying on standard economic efficiency grounds. I develop a model which highlights the fact that economic activities have costs and benefits, but an income tax system taxes only some of those benefits. The efficient deduction rule allows the deduction of a share of the cost equal to the share of the benefit that is taxed. I also show that the deadweight loss due to a departure from the efficient deduction rule increases quadratically with the departure, making larger departures from the rule much more costly than smaller ones.
MALTA’S PM
The tiny island nation of Malta
has a new prime
minister. Robert Abela, a first-term lawmaker, was sworn in on
Monday. He took office following the resignation of his predecessor, Joseph
Muscat, whose top adviser was linked to the car bomb murder of investigative
reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia. He’s vowed to strengthen the rule of law in
the country, but avoided questions about the ongoing murder probe.
THE IMPOSSIBLE
Scientists taking photographs
of the impossible – the black hole – was just one collaborative highlight from
2019. Collaboration is in our blood here at ICIJ, so we asked our team what
non-journalism collaborations they loved last year. We have everything from dancing pro
footballers, Dolly Parton songs, free-range eggs and baseball to
share!
