Beyond Labels

A 360° Discussion of Foreign, National and Local Policy Issues

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A few links from today’s meeting

This site “explores the pros and cons of controversial topic.  The page on “peer reviewed studies on medical marijuana” says 63% of such studies were favorable, and only 8%  not.

BUT some of the “peer reviews studies” were in publications with suspicious sounding names like “Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics.” Which, for all I know, is a completely legit publication. On the other hand.

International Journal of Advanced Computer technology sounds legit-ish, but

Google’s public data explorer has a bunch of data in easy-to-browse and visualize form. For example you can compares per-capita  income in the US, over time, in various locales. Or unemployment in Europe, over time. Or an animated view of changes in life expectancy and fertility rate, over time.

Background check stats from The Brady Campaign say

Since taking effect in 1994, the law has blocked more than 2.8 million gun sales to prohibited purchasers including felons, domestic abusers, and other dangerous individuals

Source of NRA income form tax filings.

 

Most recent on the left:

 

Beyond Labels Chat

The technology for building web apps is moving faster than ever.

If you go to this site, you’ll see (until I take it down or replace it with something else) a web-based chat app that I built for BL.

(It runs on the desktop — with Chrome and Firefox at least and maybe newer versions of Microsoft Edge, and maybe IE.

It runs on mobile devices: Android, iPhone, tablets.

You can sign in if you have credentials with Google. If I add a couple of lines of code I can add Facebook, Twitter, sign in by Email and other forms of authentication.

It took me ten minutes to build and deploy. Ten minutes! It took longer to write this post!

Of course it was only ten minutes because I cloned an earlier version. That one took me a whole hour! An hour!

But it was based on something that someone at Google had done and open sourced — with a tutorial. But still!

Building collaborative multi-platform apps like this is still out of the reach of most people, but it’s coming in reach fast.

I think this change has implications for what people might be able to do in ther communities — and what we might do for  Beyond Labels. It would be fun to have the folks who winter away join us even when not in the area.

Discussion topic what might this mean for us and the world?

(Note: app currently displays only the last 25 messages, so not for real use. But it does store all messages, so I could make it for real if people thought it was useful.)

 

Notes 29 July 2016

Bogus Journal accepts anti-spam paper. The article is here.

Excerpt:

The International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology has accepted for publication a manuscript that was first written in 2005 to protest spam conference invitations. The paper contains the F-word throughout the manuscript.

International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology

This is the paper that was sent to the journal in response to its spam.

The original paper (selection above) was written by David Mazières and Eddie Kohler and is entitled “Get me off your f—–g mailing list.”

The entire paper is available here. I’m especially fond of this section:

Abstract

Get me off your fucking mailing list. Get me off your fucking mailing list. Get me off your fucking mailing list. Get me off your fucking mailing list. Get me off your fucking mailing list. Get me off your fucking mailing list. Get me off your fucking mailing list.

Says is all!

Open Letter to Baghdadi, here. Click on “Read the Letter.” The table of contents is revealed by clicking a round button in the upper left hand corner.

 

Tuition assistance at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, here. Students whose families have less than $60,000 in income pay nothing for room, board, or tuition. Free tuition for less than $125,000.
At Penn the threshold is $40,000.
It’s 103 questions that could make all the difference in how you pay for college. Yet every year families shy away from filling out the form known as the FAFSA, which the government and colleges use to determine need- and some merit-based financial aid.
Open letter to Dr. Ibrahim Awwad Al-Badri, alias ‘Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’, the leader of ISIS, signed by a number of Islamic scholars.
Response.
Biotech
Predictit odds for Hillary have not changed that much.
Predictit
Fivethirtyeight “Now cast” “If the election were held today.”
nowcast
You can see the Trump RNC bump and the Clinton counter-bump.
Polls plus. This is Fivethirtyeight’s most comprehensive forecast. It’s much less sensitive to day-to-day changes in polling.
pollsplus

I am both a values-driven and a tribal Democrat and an unremitting (attempted) rationalist. The values driven part — plus education — has turned me into a (qualified) admirer of Nixon and Reagan, and has lowered my opinion of, for example, Bill Clinton. The values-driven part makes me consider the over-all set of positions, in historical context.

The rationalist part makes me react viscerally, and with hostility toward misrepresentation of facts. So I don’t like it when people

The tribal part makes me viscerally opposed to

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