Alumna Kathy Pham Creates Scholarship to Celebrate Mother’s Life and Memory

https://womenshistorymonth.cc.gatech.edu/alumni-buzz/#kathy-pham

Mary Hương Thị Phạm was one of the tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who fled for America in the 1980s. She became a U.S. citizen in 1995. She had a challenging life, navigating a new world and raising two kids, but she always made sure she taught her children to learn from the obstacles in their way.

“The challenges were good lessons for us,” Kathy Pham said. “We got jobs as soon as we were old enough to work so we could pay for our expenses and also help support the household. I think that’s good practice for any family regardless of income.”

“Another challenge was figuring out where I could go to college,” she added. “But that limitation led to me staying in state and going to Georgia Tech, which set such a strong foundation for the rest of my career. And I still smile thinking of all the bragging my mom would do about me and my brother going to Tech.”

Live a life worth living

https://lettersofnote.com/2021/03/01/live-a-life-worth-living/
Life is not fair. You would be foolish to expect fairness, at least when it comes to matters of life and death, matters outside the scope of the law, matters that cannot be engineered or manipulated by human effort, matters that are distinctly the domain of God or luck or fate or some other unknowable, incomprehensible force. [...]

My sweet babies, I do not have the answer to the question of why, at least not now and not in this life. But I do know that there is incredible value in pain and suffering, if you allow yourself to experience it, to cry, to feel sorrow and grief, to hurt. Walk through the fire and you will emerge on the other end, whole and stronger. I promise. You will ultimately find truth and beauty and wisdom and peace. You will understand that nothing lasts forever, not pain, or joy. You will understand that joy cannot exist without sadness. Relief cannot exist without pain. Compassion cannot exist without cruelty. Courage cannot exist without fear. Hope cannot exist without despair. Wisdom cannot exist without suffering. Gratitude cannot exist without deprivation. Paradoxes abound in this life. Living is an exercise in navigating within them. [...]

I have often dreamed that when I die, I will finally know what it would be like to see the world without visual impairment, to see far into the distance, to see the minute details of a bird, to drive a car. Oh, how I long to have perfect vision, even after all these years without. I long for death to make me whole, to give me what was denied me in this life. I believe this dream will come true. Similarly, when your time comes, I will be there waiting for you, so that you, too, will be given what was lost to you. I promise. But in the meantime, live, my darling babies. Live a life worth living. Live thoroughly and completely, thoughtfully, gratefully, courageously, and wisely. Live!

I love you both forever and ever, to infinity, through space and time. Never ever forget that.

Mommy

In Furor Over Poet With Child Porn Conviction, Prison Abolitionists Debate the Limits of Mercy

https://theintercept.com/2021/02/14/poetry-magazine-kirk-nesset-prison-abolition/

 WHAT HAS BEEN interesting about this dispute is that it’s not the usual law-and-order hard-liners versus insurgents against the Prison Nation, not the censors versus the American Civil Liberties Union or the anti-“cancel culture” right (though there is some of that, here and here). Rather, the outcry against Poetry reveals ambivalence among folks who are committed to dismantling the Prison Nation.

“Can @poetrymagazine publish murderers? Can they publish carjackers? Rapists?” tweeted Reginald Dwayne Betts (no relation to Tara), who participated in a carjacking at 16, was locked up for eight years, and eventually became an award-winning writer, Yale-educated lawyer, and, now, poetry editor of the New York Times. Referring to that job, he asks, “What is the line of people that cannot have poems published? … Please clue me in on what’s impermissible.”

“And also, I need to know the limits of abolitionist rhetoric. Cause, the same people saying abolition one minute and crying foul the next, I gotta get things right.”

Tara Betts’s tweet communicates that she can tolerate this, the moral tension at the heart of prison abolitionism. Dwayne Betts is asking his comrades to negotiate the terrain together, because it’s slippery.

Looking For Right And Wrong In The Philippines

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/why-do-filipinos-love-duterte

With eight major languages spoken across its 7,000-plus islands, the Philippines is a fragmented place, and even the dangers vary by region. On the northern island of Luzon, communist insurgents attack from base camps hidden in the mountains. In the Visayas, a cluster of touristic islands in the center of the country, military forces recently warded off an attempted terrorist attack by Abu Sayyaf, a jihadist group pledging allegiance to ISIS. In Mindanao, the threat comes from the Islamist rebel groups determined to form an independent state for the country’s Muslim minorities.

These rebels carry on a war that their ancestors had waged for centuries, resisting the Spanish colonizers who arrived in 1521 and the American occupiers of the early 20th century. In 1989, the Philippine government granted the rebels partial autonomy over a crescent of land along the eastern coast of Mindanao. Today, the region is a hub of militant activity. Communist guerrillas, Muslim separatist rebels, and jihadist terrorist groups have all made base in the area. The fighting got so bad this May that President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law over the entire island of Mindanao.

My Uncle Pepo and other locals consider the rebel-controlled land off-limits, and the area just outside its border a danger zone. Our farm sits 5 miles from that border.

On Facebook and misinformation

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/

Since then, other employees have corroborated these findings. A former Facebook AI researcher who joined in 2018 says he and his team conducted “study after study” confirming the same basic idea: models that maximize engagement increase polarization. They could easily track how strongly users agreed or disagreed on different issues, what content they liked to engage with, and how their stances changed as a result. Regardless of the issue, the models learned to feed users increasingly extreme viewpoints. “Over time they measurably become more polarized,” he says.

The researcher’s team also found that users with a tendency to post or engage with melancholy content—a possible sign of depression—could easily spiral into consuming increasingly negative material that risked further worsening their mental health. The team proposed tweaking the content-ranking models for these users to stop maximizing engagement alone, so they would be shown less of the depressing stuff. “The question for leadership was: Should we be optimizing for engagement if you find that somebody is in a vulnerable state of mind?” he remembers. (A Facebook spokesperson said she could not find documentation for this proposal.)

OrbitRock_ on forests and climate change

https://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought/comments/m1tzgb/trees_lost_to_drought_and_wildfires_are_not/gqjcx3i/

Comparing 1970s-2000 to 2000-2016, the fire season of the latter is 17 days longer, and the window for highest risk of severe fire 9 days longer.

Earlier snowmelt also contributes, especially in combination with a longer warm season.

So, even though we can expect that more large fire is likely due to our legacy of forest management practices, forest aridity is a key driving factor of fire and it has increased substantially over the past decades.

climate change has increased the aridity of forests, the probability of fire, the probability of severe fire, and in many places, decreased the probability of tree regeneration post-fire. And a lot of research supports this.

Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving 'Star Wars' Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and 'Raya and the Last Dragon'

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/resurrection-of-kelly-marie-tran-on-surviving-star-wars-bullying-the-pressures-of-representation-and-raya-and-the-last-dragon

When told that her behavior is unusual for an actor: "That makes me want to die," says Tran. "Maybe it's because, to this day, I still have worked longer as an admin assistant than a working actor, and because I didn't grow up in the industry. Going into my first movie, I remember people being like, 'Oh, you're hanging out with the PAs on the weekends,' and I'd be like, 'Yeah, so?' I still don't ever want to believe these made-up status titles we have in Hollywood. I tell my agents all the time: 'The day that becomes me, I will go back to college and become a scientist.' "

u/drewiepoodle on trans discrimination

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/lsbqec/rand_paul_goes_on_unhinged_transphobic_rant_at_dr/goqchm4/

The transgender community has a high rates of suicide attempts because of discrimination against us, not because we're trans.

• Kyle K. H. Tan, et al., 2020 Study finds that transgender people who have experienced stigma, including harassment, violence, and discrimination because of their identity are much more likely to have poor mental health outcomes.

• Perez-Brumer, 2017: "Mediation analyses demonstrated that established psychosocial factors, including depression and school-based victimization, partly explained the association between gender identity and suicidal ideation."

• Seelman, 2016: "Findings indicate relationships between denial of access to bathrooms and gender-appropriate campus housing and increased risk for suicidality, even after controlling for interpersonal victimization in college. "

• Klein, Golub, 2016: "After controlling for age, race/ethnicity, sex assigned at birth, binary gender identity, income, education, and employment status, family rejection was associated with increased odds of both behaviors. Odds increased significantly with increasing levels of family rejection."

• Miller, Grollman, 2015: "The results suggest that gender nonconforming trans people face more discrimination and, in turn, are more likely to engage in health‐harming behaviors than trans people who are gender conforming."

If we're supported in our transition, suicide rates actually go down:

• Bauer, et al., 2015: Transition vastly reduces risks of suicide attempts, and the farther along in transition someone is the lower that risk gets.

• de Vries, et al, 2014: A clinical protocol of a multidisciplinary team with mental health professionals, physicians, and surgeons, including puberty suppression, followed by cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgery, provides trans youth the opportunity to develop into well-functioning young adults. All showed significant improvement in their psychological health, and they had notably lower rates of internalizing psychopathology than previously reported among trans children living as their natal sex. Well-being was similar to or better than same-age young adults from the general population.

• Gorton, 2011 (Prepared for the San Francisco Department of Public Health): “In a cross-sectional study of 141 transgender patients, Kuiper and Cohen-Kittenis found that after medical intervention and treatments, suicide fell from 19 percent to zero percent in transgender men and from 24 percent to 6 percent in transgender women.)”

• Murad, et al., 2010: "Significant decrease in suicidality post-treatment. The average reduction was from 30% pretreatment to 8% post treatment."

• De Cuypere, et al., 2006: Rate of suicide attempts dropped dramatically from 29.3% to 5.1% after receiving medical and surgical treatment among Dutch patients treated from 1986-2001.

• UK study: "Suicidal ideation and actual attempts reduced after transition, with 63% thinking about or attempting suicide more before they transitioned and only 3% thinking about or attempting suicide more post-transition.

• Heylens, 2014: Found that the psychological state of transgender people "resembled those of a general population after hormone therapy was initiated."

• Perez-Brumer, 2017: "These findings suggest that interventions that address depression and school-based victimization could decrease gender identity-based disparities in suicidal ideation."

Inside the Chaotic, Cutthroat Gray Market for N95 Masks

 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/magazine/n95-masks-market-covid.html

Artenstein, the chief physician executive at Baystate Health, emailed me in October. “There still does not appear to be a coherent, organized and effective (or even potentially effective) plan by this administration to address ongoing P.P.E. shortages,” he wrote. “Trust me, these are ongoing and will only worsen.” Indeed, the shortages have already returned as the virus runs rampant through the country once again. And though President-elect Biden has promised to federalize the P.P.E. response, he won’t take office until January 20 — and the current administration’s obstruction of the transfer of power may further delay his ability to act quickly.

The primary wisdom that Artenstein was providing to other health care systems asking for his advice was to not expect substantial help from the federal government. In a sense, the Trump administration had achieved one of its goals: It had trained Americans not to rely on it. Everyone was on his or her own in this pandemic, Artenstein warned. That was the American way.

Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science

https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/articles/250078-lets-not-dumb-down-the-history-of-computer-science/fulltext

All we get nowadays is dumbed-down. Thank goodness historians of mathematics have not entirely abandoned writing articles that contain formulas or explain scientific ideas.

"I am sure that business histories are as difficult to write as technical histories, and they are no doubt also as valuable to businessmen as technical histories are valuable to technicians. But you seem to be celebrating the fact that nobody writes technical CS history at all anymore!

"When you speak of 'obvious holes', you are thinking of obvious holes in business history ... the video game industry, for example. But how about the people who write video games: They invent marvelous breakthroughs in techniques about how to render scenes and pack data and do things in parallel and coordinate thousands of online users. The lack of anything even close to describing these techniques and how they were discovered and under what constraints seems to me a much more obvious hole; yet you show no inclination to admit its existence much less to suggest plugging it."

5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/how-public-health-messaging-backfired/618147/

This pessimism is sapping people of energy to get through the winter, and the rest of this pandemic. Anti-vaccination groups and those opposing the current public-health measures have been vigorously amplifying the pessimistic messages—especially the idea that getting vaccinated doesn’t mean being able to do more—telling their audiences that there is no point in compliance, or in eventual vaccination, because it will not lead to any positive changes. They are using the moment and the messaging to deepen mistrust of public-health authorities, accusing them of moving the goalposts and implying that we’re being conned. Either the vaccines aren’t as good as claimed, they suggest, or the real goal of pandemic-safety measures is to control the public, not the virus.

Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty. And now, even as vaccines offer brilliant hope, and even though, at least in the United States, we no longer have to deal with the problem of a misinformer in chief, some officials and media outlets are repeating many of the same mistakes in handling the vaccine rollout.

The Road From Serfdom - How Americans can become citizens again

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/danielle-allen-american-citizens-serfdom/600778/

The kinds of economists involved most intimately with government and financial institutions by and large don’t notice real people in real places—people who may be losing jobs and falling into despondency, addiction, and suicide. They tend not to see as relevant to their domains of expertise the millions of people on the move and the impact of mass migration on cultural cohesion. In recent years, they overlooked the warning signs indicating limits to the acceptance of their worldview, notably in the very communities suffering because of their economic policies. Elites on both the left and the right, with their well-thumbed passports and multicultural outlook, were no less blind. They did not see the pressures rising. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, I more than once heard an economist friend say something like the following: “We knew globalization would force transformations, but we never thought they would be localized in a specific subset of communities.” And: “We knew that globalization would cause disruption over a 20-year period, but I never thought about what 20 years is like in the life of a specific person or community.” The very language conveys remoteness—the sheer size of the chasm between the World Economic Forum and the actual world. This is what happens when the messy, mediating business of popular politics no longer functions properly—when it no longer serves as the membrane through which ideas must pass before they turn into action.

Venezuela's Story: Democratic Paths to Authoritarianism

https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2021/02/24/venezuelas_story_democratic_paths_to_authoritarianism_661643.html

The depressing reality of the Venezuela crisis is that democracy was and is abused and twisted for authoritarian ends. Leaders can come to power legitimately and undermine the rule of law and other key democratic tenets. Venezuela stands as proof that democracy, once attained, is not guaranteed any permanence. This poses unique challenges to democracies globally. If the world’s democracies are unable to come to a consensus on how to respond to democratic backsliding, the risk of additional countries adopting authoritarian tendencies will increase. Without the ability to insulate democratic institutions against authoritarian attacks and abuses, the United States and other democracies could suffer similar assaults and setbacks on their institutions and democracy. 

Seeking the True Story of the Comfort Women

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/seeking-the-true-story-of-the-comfort-women-j-mark-ramseyer

How a Harvard professor’s dubious scholarship reignited a history of mistrust between South Korea and Japan.

 

Death, Through a Nurse’s Eyes

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/opinion/covid-icu-nurses-arizona.html

A short film offering a firsthand perspective of the brutality of the pandemic inside a Covid-19 I.C.U.

Looking at Yesterday, Today

https://magazine.williams.edu/2016/summer/feature/looking-at-yesterday-today/

Leslie Brown: A history of slavery needs to be done at Williams, too. We know Ephraim Williams had a slave or two.

Beschloss: How much more do we know about this dimension of Eph Williams?

Dew: Not much. He was a prominent New Englander of his place and time, which meant he had a handful of slaves. The study of the history of the institution that comes from this sort of awareness can be incredibly valuable. What happened with Ephraim Williams’ slaves when he died? Were they sold as part of his estate, and did those resources go into the founding of the college?

Brown: Or did his slaves create the wealth Eph already had?

Beschloss: In the past, people haven’t always paid close attention to information about where the money comes from. [...]

Brown: One thing that should come to us in these conversations about historical representation is that these were not up/ down decisions that were made, or yes/no, positive/negative. So, yes, there’s the money from the slave trade. Meanwhile, Williams had the first abolition society on any campus.

Dew: An alumnus recently acquired and gave to the Chapin Library a pamphlet that came out of a Williams abolition society from the mid-1820s. That’s well before William Lloyd Garrison started The Liberator [a weekly newspaper denouncing slavery]. It’s important to be aware of the religious and moral heritage of the school and to understand how evangelical this place was in the 19th century.

Brown: Southern students might have brought their slaves with them to campus. But this area was also an Underground Railroad site. The fact that the abolitionist society was having public debates means there was an exchange of ideas, a discourse. Students in that era dealt with these issues among themselves and developed their own politics. When you move into the Civil War era, you note the number of students who left the college to go to war and who did Freedmen’s Bureau work after that. The founder of the Hampton Institute was a Williams graduate.

fietsvrouw on how to carry on through learning something

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/comments/lo5hsk/question_i_just_booked_my_first_guitar_lesson_at/go47mgm/

I have been teaching guitar for 41 years. The biggest predictor, bar none, for who will carry on and who will drop out is the capacity to enjoy and celebrate every gain.

A student who comes in, wants to sound like Eric Clapton, and then expresses constant frustration at how long it is going to take, how far from that he or she is, etc. will probably last no more than 6 weeks.

A student who feels like - omg, I am playing the guitar!! when they learn 3 chords, ion the other hand, and who makes the effort to notice what they can do today that they could not do last week is usually a student who is in it for the long haul. They learn faster, they have more fun, and they stick with it.

this is something you have control of. Cultivate that sense of "look at me go!!!!" and enjoy every tiny step and victory. The process has to be fun because you never really "arrive" - you just keep improving and widening your skill set.

A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY…

https://www.diamandis.com/blog/false-sense-security

I thought creating a COVID “Immunity Bubble” for a small group in a TV studio setting was possible. I was wrong.

This is the story of what happened, what went wrong, and what we learned.

Just as importantly, it is a story of what questions remain to be answered about the accuracy of testing before we can safely return to work, travel, relax in small groups, or see our kids off to school. If any of you have ever experienced a new confidence or an impulse to lower your vigilance with masks and social distancing after receiving a negative PCR test, you need to read this.

The story is presented in detail below, but the bottom line is as follows: Despite a total of 452 (PCR & Rapid Antigen) tests and four physicians on-staff during a highly contained small gathering, 24 people in our "Immunity Bubble" (~ 25%) tested positive for the coronavirus - including me.

I’m humbled and pained by what I learned.  

This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/11/29/penn-station-robert-caro-073564

Trying to make sense of the swirl, I built a timeline on a spreadsheet, which grew to nearly 600 entries. After years of research, a picture began to emerge—one that, beyond the scope of any given anecdote, told a dispiriting story about the futility of present-day American government, and reshaped my view of progressive politics.

The story of Penn Station’s halting redevelopment comes in three separate waves of effort that rose up to replace the current squalor—and then, in the first two cases, crumbled into nothing. Pundits and editorials have tended to blame a rotating cast of characters for the rot—the railroad that owns the station, the state bureaucracies that have neglected it, the private real estate interests that have hemmed it in. But Penn Station has actually languished at the hands of another simple reality: No one has the leverage to fix it. The sad state of America’s most important train station stems more from a failure of power than a failure of leadership. And shockingly enough, that’s not by mistake—it’s by design.

The Anti-Reactionary FAQ

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/

This is the Anti-Reactionary FAQ. It is meant to rebut some common beliefs held by the political movement called Reaction or Neoreaction.