She’s the “avenging angel,” the “ministering angel,” the “lady with the lamp”—the brave woman whose name would become synonymous with selflessness and compassion. Yet as Britain prepares to celebrate Florence Nightingale’s 200th birthday on May 12—with a wreath-laying at Waterloo Place, a special version of the annual Procession of the Lamp at Westminster Abbey, a two-day conference on nursing and global health sponsored by the Florence Nightingale Foundation, and tours of her summer home in Derbyshire—scholars are debating her reputation and accomplishments.
Detractors recently have chipped away at Nightingale’s role as a caregiver, pointing out that she served as a nurse for only three years. Meanwhile, perhaps surprisingly, some British nurses themselves have suggested they are tired of working in her shadow. But researchers are calling attention to her pioneering work as a statistician and as an early advocate for the modern idea that health care is a human right. Mark Bostridge, author of the biography Florence Nightingale, attributes much of the controversy to Nightingale’s defiance of Victorian conventions. “We are very uncomfortable still with an intellectually powerful woman whose primary aim has nothing to do with men or family,” Bostridge told me. “I think misogyny has a lot to do with it.”
Germany’s “Corona Aid Package” for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses
The “Bazooka” – this is what Federal Minister for Finances Olaf Scholz (SPD, also Deputy Chancellor) calls the Corona Aid Package, announced on Monday. The cabinet has set aside a sum of €122.5 billion to help individuals and businesses. Solo entrepreneurs and small businesses are set to receive financial aid of €9,000 to €15,000.
Civic Technology Can Help Stop a Pandemic
The spread of the novel coronavirus and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic have provided a powerful test of social and governance systems. Neither of the world’s two leading powers, China and the United States, has been particularly distinguished in responding. In China, an initial bout of political denial allowed the virus to spread for weeks, first domestically and then globally, before a set of forceful measures proved reasonably effective. (The Chinese government also should have been better prepared, given that viruses have jumped from animal hosts to humans within its territory on multiple occasions in the past.) The United States underwent its own bout of political denial before adopting social-distancing policies; even now, its lack of investment in public health leaves it ill-equipped for this sort of emergency.
The response of the bureaucratic and often technophobic European Union may prove even worse: Italy, although far from the epicenter of the outbreak, has four times the per capita rate of cases as China does, and even famously orderly Germany is already at half China’s rate. Nations in other parts of the world, such as information-manipulating Iran, provide worse examples yet.
Taiwan’s success has rested on a fusion of technology, activism, and civic participation. A small but technologically cutting-edge democracy, living in the shadow of the superpower across the strait, Taiwan has in recent years developed one of the world’s most vibrant political cultures by making technology work to democracy’s advantage rather than detriment. This culture of civic technology has proved to be the country’s strongest immune response to the new coronavirus.
TECH FOR DEMOCRACY
The value of Taiwan’s tech-enabled civic culture has become abundantly clear in the current crisis. Bottom-up information sharing, public-private partnerships, “hacktivism” (activism through the building of quick-and-dirty but effective proofs of concept for online public services), and participatory collective action have been central to the country’s success in coordinating a consensual and transparent set of responses to the coronavirus. A recent report from the Stanford University School of Medicine documents 124 distinct interventions that Taiwan implemented with remarkable speed. Many of these interventions bubbled into the public sector through community initiatives, hackathons, and digital deliberation on the vTaiwan digital democracy platform, on which almost half the country’s population participates. (The platform enables large-scale hacktivism, civic deliberation, and scaling up of initiatives in an orderly and largely consensual manner.) A decentralized community of participants used tools such as Slack and HackMD to refine successful projects. (Much of our analysis is based on open interviews through these tools with leaders in the g0v community of civic hackers.)
Tracing the American cemetery from the colonial age to the Gilded Age.
Tombstones have always been tools of memory. “If a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps,” Benedick warned in Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century play Much Ado About Nothing. And few want to be forgotten, as the rows of carved granite and marble that fill cemeteries across the United States attest—even if the methods of rendering that remembering into a symbol or setting have changed and the context of these memorials has altered enough to make it hard to understand what we were supposed to remember in the first place.
The image of cemeteries that people in the United States might be familiar with—verdant hills and quiet—is a product of changes in how the living chose to remember the dead that culminated in the nineteenth century. In previous centuries people were often memorialized as part of a collective, whether that was a church, society, or family. In the Victorian era, the emphasis was much more on the individual and their glory, both on this earth and in a believed next life. The American rural cemetery movement that established many of the spaces we know today expelled the dead from the urban centers. There they had been part of neighborhoods in churchyards, private burial grounds, and potter’s fields. The movement relocated burials to garden-like spaces where the dead could be mourned in rustic settings that didn’t impede city development. For the elite, this meant more space for elaborate memorials and mausoleums; for the middle class, there were the orderly lines of plain granite tombs promoted by the newly burgeoning funeral industry. For the marginalized, the public burial grounds were also pushed to the edges but often in more hidden areas, such as New York’s Hart Island, where they were interred in mass graves.
A Look at AirBnB’s Business Model
What’s wrong with AirBnb?
AirBnb is reportedly around 15000 employees with 3 billions in revenues.
They are as large as related conglomerates comprising tens of companies, except AirBnb is a single company running a single website!
They don’t even operate in as many countries or currencies.
Needless to say their strategy has been to burn as much VC cash as possible and hire has many employees as possible. A standard strategy to inflate valuation and raise even more money.
Sunday Services
Timely messages.
We pray for forgiveness, health, safety and confidence around the world.
2020 Madison School Board Election Candidate Discussions
Logan Wroge (Gomez – Schmidt vs Pearson):
Pearson views full-day 4K and incorporating other cultures into classroom curriculum — “outside of one month” — as strategies to close the gap.
Gomez Schmidt sees a new reading curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade as crucial in improving outcomes, along with “relevant and rigorous” coursework at the middle and high school levels.
(Nicki Vander Meulen and Wayne Strong):
Strong, a retired Madison police lieutenant, lost a close board race in 2013 and by a larger margin the following year. When Vander Meulen was first elected in 2017, she and incumbent Ed Hughes were the top two vote-getters in a three-way primary, but Hughes dropped out of the race before the general election.
If elected to a second term, Vander Meulen, 41, said she wants to prioritize the “inexcusable” achievement gap, boosting “shameful” reading scores and improving graduation rates for students with disabilities — 50% of students with disabilities graduated on time last spring.
Strong has two main priorities if he joins the board: Putting a “laser focus” on what is causing students to receive out-of-school suspensions and reducing the disproportionate rate of black students who receive those suspensions and ensuring schools are safe for students and teachers.
“If the school climate is such that our kids don’t feel safe, they’re not going to be productive,” the 60-year-old Strong said.
Much more on the April 7, 2020 Madison School Board election, here.
Western Universities Rely on China. After the Virus, That May Not Last.
“In quite a short period of time, we have become sort of addicted to one source of income,” said Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese studies at King’s College London. “If the worst case happens and Chinese students don’t want to come here in September, it’s potentially a kind of seismic change.”
In Britain, some Chinese students are fuming that universities did not act more decisively to move classes online and scrap major events like spring balls. In interviews, they said they were weighing the health benefits of wearing a surgical mask with their fear of being racially abused or even attacked, as a student from Singapore was last month in London.
‘Invoice Barr’ and the ‘Second Modification’: How Article Spinning Works
There is a large network of websites using political content to draw an audience to the sites where some dubious advertising techniques are being employed. All of the content published on these websites is lifted from other sources. Some is current news, some is old – but true – news, published without a byline or date. And many stories are fake-news classics.
But most of what is published is satire stolen from “America’s Last Line of Defense,” a group of websites run by a self-described liberal troll named Christopher Blair. Many people do not recognize the ALLOD-branded watermark left behind on the swiped satire stories. Published without context, these stories mislead many people into believing they are actually new news. Adding to the confusion is the legibility problem – many of the stories have been spun.
Inside the National Quarantine Center, There Is No Fear of Coronavirus. There Is Only Urgency.
The National Quarantine Center, this nation’s only federal quarantine facility, sits on a single floor of a new building on the campus of the University of Nebraska Medical Center west of downtown Omaha. It holds 20 beds, 15 of which are occupied by patients exposed to the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV2, including several passengers from cruise ship Diamond Princess.
A couple of blocks away sits the UNMC biocontainment unit, the largest of its kind in this country, which takes up part of an upper floor in a large inpatient-care facility. Ten beds, with a 35-bed surge capacity. Two pressurized entrances providing constant negative air pressure via a HEPA airflow system, and decontamination autoclaves for waste disposal. Currently four of the beds are occupied by contagious COVID-19 patients. (“COVID” means coronavirus disease.)