Monday, December 23

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Living Through The Realities Of Pandemics And Inequality While Teaching About Them
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EDUCATION

Living Through The Realities Of Pandemics And Inequality While Teaching About Them

Jodi Benenson and Tara Kolar Bryan are professors in the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska Omaha. In the fall of 2020 they coordinated a team-taught graduate-level course called Pandemics, Protest and Policy that centered around public policy and management issues happening in real time. Here, they answer five questions about what they learned. 1. How did you teach students about the pandemic while it’s happening? Tara Bryan: We wanted to respond to this unprecedented time in a way that can best serve our students and local community by making the most of our faculty’s related expertise. For example, our colleague Njoki Mwarumba taught about the history of pandemics. Bryce Hoflund shared recent research regarding how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting food insec...
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Using Data In Sports For These Students, Is About More Than Winning Games
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TECHNOLOGY

Using Data In Sports For These Students, Is About More Than Winning Games

When professional sports teams use big data and analytics, their objective is to improve player performance and win more games. That approach is paying off in a major way. For instance, after the Golden State Warriors became one of the first NBA teams to invest in analytics, the team subsequently won league championships in 2015, 2017 and 2018. Analytics is the science of looking for patterns in data to make more informed decisions. The Warriors also get regular assists from partners in Silicon Valley – the famed tech hub near where the team is based. For that reason, it’s a small wonder why, in 2016, the Warriors were recognized at a sports analytics conference as the “Best Analytics Organization.” National Football League teams rely heavily on data as well. For instance, the Philadelp...
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We Asked 6 Education Experts – How Should Schools Teach Kids About What Happened At The US Capitol On Jan. 6?
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EDUCATION

We Asked 6 Education Experts – How Should Schools Teach Kids About What Happened At The US Capitol On Jan. 6?

Teachers scrambled to create lesson plans to help students make sense of the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol right after it happened. It’s a fraught task. Even the news media wasn’t sure what to call this unprecedented attack on U.S. democracy. Was it a coup? A riot? An act of domestic terrorism? Likewise, it’s not clear where lessons should begin. The Conversation U.S. asked six education experts how teachers – and parents – can help young people comprehend, analyze and process what happened. Don’t avoid the topic Dr. David Schonfeld, director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and professor of clinical pediatrics, University of Southern California Educators may worry they don’t know the right thing to say and will unnecessarily ...
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What A Revolt’s Archives Tells Us About Reckoning With Slavery And Who Owns The Past
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SOCIAL JUSTICE

What A Revolt’s Archives Tells Us About Reckoning With Slavery And Who Owns The Past

The consequences of 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade are still felt today. Untangling the power structures and systemic racism that came with slavery is ongoing, with police brutality, memorials to slave owners and reparations forming part of the discussion. Statue of the Berbice slave revolt leader Kofi in Georgetown, Guyana. David Stanley - Flickr/WikiMedia, CC BY-SA But as the United Nations marks Dec. 2 as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, a practice it notes “is not merely a historic relic,” modern society also has to reckon with another question: Who has access to the records about slavery’s past? I was struck by this question recently as I gave a Zoom talk in Guyana on my new book Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast about ...
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Raising More Concerns About Climate Change – A Record-Smasher, The 2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season
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ENVIRONMENT, TECHNOLOGY

Raising More Concerns About Climate Change – A Record-Smasher, The 2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season

It was clear before the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season started that it was going to be busy. Six months later, we’re looking back at a trail of broken records, and the storms may still not be over even with the season’s official end on Nov. 30. This season had the most named storms, with 30, taking the record from the calamitous 2005 season that brought Hurricane Katrina to New Orleans. It was only the second time the list of storm names was exhausted since naming began in the 1950s. Ten storms underwent rapid intensification, a number not seen since 1995. Twelve made landfall in the U.S., also setting a new record. Six of those landfalling storms were hurricane strength, tying yet another record. Tropical storm tracks show how busy the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was. Brian McNoldy, ...
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Cellphones, What’s Cellular About Them
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VIDEO REELS

Cellphones, What’s Cellular About Them

Daniel Bliss is a professor of electrical engineering at Arizona State University and the director of the Center for Wireless Information Systems and Computational Architecture. In this interview, he explains the ideas behind the original cellular networks and how they evolved over the years into today’s 5G (fifth generation) and even 6G (sixth generation) networks. Daniel Bliss provides a brief history of cellular networks. How did wireless phones work before cellular technology? The idea of wireless communications is quite old. Famously, the Marconi system could talk all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. It would have one system, which was the size of a building, talking to another system, which was the size of a building. But in essence, it just made a radio link between the two. Event...
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Air Pollution And COVID-19 Deaths – Studies Raising Questions About EPA’s ‘Acceptable Risk’
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

Air Pollution And COVID-19 Deaths – Studies Raising Questions About EPA’s ‘Acceptable Risk’

The pandemic is putting America’s air pollution standards to the test as the COVID-19 death toll rises. The U.S. government sets limits on hazardous air pollutants to try to protect public health, but it can be difficult to determine where to draw the line for what is considered “acceptable risk.” Power plants, factories and other pollution sources release hundreds of million pounds of hazardous pollutants into the air every year. As the coronavirus spreads, the pattern of deaths suggests there are serious weaknesses in the current public safeguards. Several studies have explored connections between air pollution and severe cases of the respiratory illnesses. The latest, published on Oct. 26, estimates that about 15% of people who died from COVID-19 worldwide had had long-term exposure ...
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Venmo and Cash App – The Rise Of Digital Handouts, What It Says About Our Fraying Social Safety Net
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TECHNOLOGY

Venmo and Cash App – The Rise Of Digital Handouts, What It Says About Our Fraying Social Safety Net

A college student pleading for grocery money. A driver in need of an unexpected car repair. A worker out of a job because of the COVID-19 pandemic. A single mom who needs to pay the internet bill to support her kids’ distance learning. In all of these cases, people turned to Twitter to ask for financial support during the pandemic. Not thousands of dollars. Just a few bucks. Whatever online followers could spare. As a consumer sociologist, I study digital culture and social media. I’ve noticed an uptick in these requests on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram, which are made possible by the growing popularity of peer-to-peer payment platforms like PayPal, Venmo, Cash App and Zelle. This diverges from traditional crowdfunding in which official online campaigns are set up for lofty fundraising ...
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Socialized Health Care For Trump. What About the Rest of Us?
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

Socialized Health Care For Trump. What About the Rest of Us?

We don’t know what course COVID-19 will take with Donald Trump. The White House insists he is well, even as the barrage of aggressive and even experimental treatments he’s received suggests his case is more severe than they let on. But we do know that if anyone with the virus—not to mention someone with Trump’s increased risk factors—has a good chance of pulling through, it’s him. Trump is tested regularly, so he knew at the earliest possible moment that he was infected (even if he didn’t wear a mask or cancel public events afterward). He has doctors at his side, with their sole focus on him and his wife. He has access to all available treatments and even to treatments that aren’t yet available to the public. Unlike millions of Americans, Trump didn’t have to wait for symptoms to qualif...
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Your child’s vaccines: What you need to know about catching up during the COVID-19 pandemic
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS, Journalism

Your child’s vaccines: What you need to know about catching up during the COVID-19 pandemic

This spring, after stay-at-home orders were announced and schools shut down across the nation, many families stopped going to their pediatrician. As a result, kids have fallen behind on important childhood vaccinations. Vaccination rates declined starkly after mid-March, with up to 60% reductions in some areas of the country. Nationwide, vaccination rates dropped by 22% among Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program recipients under 2. Now that kids are coming back to pediatricians like me, many parents have questions about catching up. Why is it a problem that my child is behind on vaccines? Vaccines protect your child from serious communicable diseases including brain infections, pneumonia, bloodstream infections and, in the case of the HPV and hepatitis B vaccines, even some t...
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