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Why American Construction Costs Are So High
I am embarking on a long-term project to investigate why US construction costs are high using case studies, so everything I’m going to say so far is tentative. In particular, one of my favori…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 742 posts.
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Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing (2017)
Autistic burnout is a state of physical and mental fatigue, heightened stress, and diminished capacity to manage life skills, sensory input, and/or social interactions, which comes from years of being severely overtaxed by the strain of trying to live up to demands that are out of sync with our needs.
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Facebook Doubles Down on Misusing Your Phone Number
When we publicly demanded that Facebook stop messing with users’ phone numbers last week, we weren’t expecting the social network to double down quite like this: By default, anyone can use the phone number that a user provides for two-factor authentication (2FA) to find that user’s profile. For...
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German Data Privacy Commissioner Says Article 13 Inevitably Leads to Filters
German Data Privacy Commissioner Ulrich Kelber is also a computer scientist, which makes him uniquely qualified to comment on the potential consequences of the proposed new EU Copyright Directive. The Directive will be voted on at the end of this month, and its Article 13 requires that online...
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Status as a Service
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
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Protest against the EU radio lockdown
We are facing a EU regulation which may make it impossible to install a custom piece of software on most radio decives like WiFi routers, smartphones and embedded devices. You can now give feedback on …
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Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
We live in an era that devalues conformity, while simultaneously preserving it in many interesting ways. Everyone is allowed to have an opinion. Divergent views produce conflict, however, and disagreement, argument, and debate define our current moment. If we merely disagreed on matters of taste - our favorite color…
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Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now, One Teacher’s Take
One teacher compares the life of a middle schooler in 2008 versus 2018. There is a startling difference. Learn what life looks like for middle schoolers today, and gain valuable tips on how to reclaim childhood for your kids in this digital age.
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Link between health spending and life expectancy: US is an outlier (2017)
Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries despite paying much more for healthcare. What factors may explain this?
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UC terminates subscriptions with Elsevier in push for open access
As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC…
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Leading with Wikipedia: A brand proposal for 2030
A few months ago, people across the world were asked “What is Wikimedia?” Almost no one answered correctly. But while “Wikimedia” may not be widely recognized outside our movement, there is a clear way to use our existing brands to better bring in the billions of people who have yet to join us in our….
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Wage Stagnation
[Epistemic status: I am basing this on widely-accepted published research, but I can’t guarantee I’ve understood the research right or managed to emphasize/believe the right people. Som…
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Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences
Recently, OpenAI came out with a new language model that automatically synthesizes text, called GPT-2. It’s disturbingly good. You can see some examples (cherry-picked, by their own admissio…
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Twitter Thread Compiler Apps and Copyright Ethics
Twitter threads are a pain to read! So let's just steal them, right? Umm... Nope, probably wrong. I'm going to say very wrong. Think about it.
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Rates of Motor Vehicle Crashes, Injuries and Deaths in Relation to Driver Age, United States, 2014-2015
This Research Brief presents updated data on crash risk using data on crashes from the US DOT in conjunction with data on driving mileage from the AAA Foundation's American Driving Survey.
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We’re Reading Fahrenheit 451 Wrong (2018)
I was reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 a day or two ago while reading Ian Bogost on Apple’s Airpods. Bogost examined Airpods’ potential long term social consequences. …
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RIP Culture War Thread
[This post is having major technical issues. Some comments may not be appearing. If you can’t comment, please say so on the subreddit.] I. I Come To Praise Caesar, Not To Bury Him Several yea…
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Cancer death rates are falling, five-year survival rates rising
Cancers are one of the leading causes of death globally. Are we making progress against them?
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Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia
D ystopia is all the rage these days. Not only does it make for hit television, in the form of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle , but it is the concern of many popular fiction and Internet ruminations. Indeed, it has become a weaponized term in the culture, used against Donald Trump…
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Trolls Are Real
In most issues of EFFector, we give an overview of all the work we’re doing at EFF. Today, in light of recent developments at the U.S. Patent Office, we’re doing a deep dive into a single issue: recent changes to the patent system, and how it’s in danger of heading backwards.
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Overwatch Randomized Trial on Gender
A recurring discussion in Overwatch (as well as other online games) is whether or not women are treated differently from men. If you do a quick search, you can find hundreds of discussions about this, some of which have well over a thousand comments. These discussions tend to go the same way and involve the same…
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How Badly Is Google Books Search Broken, and Why?
I periodically write about Google Books here, so I thought I'd point out something that I've noticed recently that should be concerning to a...
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An Honest Living
What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition.