Telehealth’s Limits: Battle Over State Lines and Licensing Threatens Patients’ Options

Dane County Board Chair Analiese Eicher told the Cap Times Monday that the resolution is “injecting unnecessary politicization into a very real public health crisis that is impacting our lives in so many ways.”

How to Look Up Prices at Your Hospital, if They Exist

Hunger in the Heart of Empire: Pellagra in the United States

what features or design decisions would it pick that PostgreSQL and MySQL cannot adapt for historic reasons?

Incident: China Airlines A333 at Taipei on Jun 14th 2020, all primary computers, reversers and autobrakes failed on touchdown

The CDC reported 11.3 million wasted COVID-19 vaccine doses in 8 months

The Lessons of Defeat in Afghanistan: After twenty years, it hardly needs saying that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were disastrous to U.S. interests and standing.

For millennia strategists have said that in war, simplicity maximizes the odds of success. But here is the strategy devised by our scholar-soldier General Petratus. It will be mocked by military historians for centuries, perhaps longer.

This one was fun – the Court was pointing out that Dr. Hanssen testified that 30-43% of respondents in a survey he did “regularly” use Windows phones, even though MSFT has 0% market share in 2018 and no longer sell phones!

A Right-Wing Troll Appears To Have Tweeted About An FBI Investigation Into The Michigan Kidnapping Plot Before It Went Public

A mind-blowing graphic in today’s Times on what $85bn worth of lost equipment means in practice for the Taliban:

Thanks to the printing press, Martin Luther could distribute this document broadly and start the Reformation. Within a matter of years, everybody knew about his theses. They had traveled across Europe, with every copy conveying exactly the same message.

The Oasis of Palmyra Unearthing the history of the ancient city-state.

The details: NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was excused from rules that would have barred him from working with Lockheed Martin, for which he was a paid advisory board member.

Today, React Native is a polarizing framework.

To Defeat Delta Variant, Experts Recommend Doing All The Things That Didn’t Work The First Time

One of my biggest problems with the Web today is the lack of separation between documents and “apps”.

They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified.

Dutch Entrepreneurs avoiding negative interest by opening multiple bank accounts

The leadership’s unshakable attachment to the viability of the Afghan government and the success of nation-building wasn’t based on evidence. It was a belief based on a political and institutional need that it be true. It was necessary to maintain the illusion that the U.S. was there to modernize and globally integrate Afghanistan at the political level. Institutionally, it was needed to justify the losses (thousands of U.S. lives) and vast expense (trillions of dollars) already consumed by the venture and protect the careers of those involved with it. As a result of these imperatives, dissenting voices were ground into dust by the national security bureaucracy and by political factions committed to the social-reform effort there.

Amazon asked FCC to reject Starlink plan because it can’t compete, SpaceX says

Bird Photographer of the Year 2021 Winners

Churchill’s wartime tunnels under white cliffs of Dover open to the public

Joe Rogan’s podcast offers a vital canvas for new perspectives and critical thought

Stop Death Shaming: Mocking the unvaccinated dead does not save lives.

Japan needs a lot more tech workers. Can it find a place for women?

Use of artificial intelligence for image analysis in breast cancer screening programmes: systematic review of test accuracy

The future needs files

The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform

How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America, and what is the ecological cost?

Seedless blackberries with a year-round growing season? Gene editing opens up new doors for radical improvements in the long-stagnant berry market

Lest you think that a multiple of forward sales of ninety-three is normal, or that a price-to-sales-to-growth ratio of one is normal, I can tell you that historically speaking, it is not normal.

Italy Seeks to Shield Supercars From Combustion Engine Ban

ANA, JAL plan drone services to boost remote areas, own bottom lines

Machine learning’s crumbling foundations. Doing ‘data science’ with bad data.

ASML is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

You’ll hear a lot of utilitarian nonsense about $2.2 trillion etc. but that’s just the price tag you see. What you don’t see, as Harry Hazlitt reminds us, is where the real costs are — the lost opportunities, the Afghan and American lives spent, the bureaucracy empowered, the capital diverted from productive work — that come with prosecuting endless war for impossible democracy.Before Afghanistan was there a Dept. of Homeland Security? The Patriot Act? The Military Commissions Act? A Global War on Terror?Are those part of that $2.2 trillion? No. They aren’t. And yet we paid them anyway.

Censored COVID commentary.

Hospitals and Insurers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why.

I Was There: When the DC-8 Went Supersonic

Meet the Real-Life Inspiration Behind “Mr. Toad”

More than anything, the Beetle demonstrated the tremendous advances robotic manipulators made in practical applications. This directly lead to the invention of RUM in 1960 (Remote Underwater Manipulator), which could crawl along the ocean bed 20,000 feet from the surface. The lessons learned in testing and improving Beetle and RUM lead to their prized relative in 1964: the Deep Sea Vehicle (DSV) Alvin. Among Alvin’s stunning exploits…being the first manned sub to explore the Titanic in 1986.

Terms of Service, didn’t read.

Outgoing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo marked his final day in office Monday by handing out four sentence commutations and one pardon. He also made a parole board referral for a 76-year-old man over his role in the deadly 1981 Brink’s armored car robbery. David Gilbert, a Weather Underground member who was convicted of three counts of second-degree murder and four counts of first-degree robbery for his role in the crime that resulted in the deaths of Nyack police Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown as well as Brink’s guard Peter Paige. He was serving a sentence of 75 years to life in prison with no possibility of parole until 2056. Gilbert’s son, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, had lobbied Cuomo for his release

The real reason you’re not more productive at work? It’s not boredom—it’s bad UX Surprise! Enterprise software still stinks.

Silicon Valley’s driverless car dream is on the road to disaster

Open-Source Insulin: Biohackers Aiming For Distributed Production

Is Hacker News a Good Predictor of Future Tech Trends?

California’s leaders are turning the state into a third world nation complete with shantytowns. Somewhere around half of all fires in Los Angeles and the Bay Area are in tent cities and shantytowns euphemistically referred to as “homeless encampments.” In them, the strong are allowed to prey upon the weak. Many of the fires are started deliberately as revenge and retaliation for violence and crime.

The answer, it turned out, is Googlespeak™.

Nike’s End of Men: Why Nike no longer wants us to Be Like Mike

The issue of safeguarding against exploitation also applies for surrogacy, which is why most surrogacy agencies recommend that a surrogate limit the number of her pregnancies to no more than four times. Yet, according to Tober’s study, many fertility doctors and surrogates ignore these recommendations and push the limits of their bodies for financial gain. Some countries have enacted policies to counter that ability. In 2015, India, which used to have a thriving international surrogacy program, placed restrictions on the program because of popular protests led by women’s rights activists who pointed out that these programs were putting poor, uneducated women at risk of exploitation by the rich. Many of these women lived in substandard housing that were essentially foreign baby mills. Now surrogacy is only available to Indian couples or single people who need a surrogate to carry a baby.

Torrance police find 300 unopened recall ballots, with gun, drugs and mail, in sleeping man’s car

Why Innovation Heroes are a Sign of a Dysfunctional Organization

Surveillance of the Internet Backbone

Ukrainian historians say that hundreds of thousands of people were killed during Joseph Stalin’s violent repression of the 1930s, with other mass graves found in Odessa and elsewhere in Ukraine.

Increasing productivity with significant price deflation creates a depressing environment. Farmers have to invest in new methods and equipment just to stay even. Their debts are in dollars, not bushels of wheat, meaning it can be increasingly difficult to pay the bills. This impact is doubly true for tenant farmers (who skew young) that rent instead of own land. William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” and the Green Corn Rebellion are just two examples of how farm product price deflation leads to unrest and radicalism in rural areas. Once politicians could afford to pay off farmers with massive subsidy programs, they did.

Our work collectively shows that the confluence of vehicle electrification, vehicle automation and vehicle sharing may not – contrary to existing discourse – produce a favorable energy outcome.

China’s cyberspace watchdog, the CAC, just published a long (and unprecedented) set of draft regulations for recommendation algorithms. The short version: they will be tightly controlled. Key points below.

It was well known that the Taliban would come back. Afghanistan never had a functioning government and we should have prepared for the inevitable.

The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

Nvidia charges $10k for their datacenter GPUs, and they fly off the shelves. If Samsung or Intel were manufacturing, these would not be as powerful or efficient. Nvidia’s architecture prowess allows the portability of software and ease of use. It enables the new use cases for GPUs. Most power usage on GPUs is still burned on data movement and computation. Nvidia GPUs are enabled by TSMC’s prowess in leading edge silicon and advanced packaging.

How can you improve a process when you don’t know what the right process is?

Unhappy with her breast implant surgery, she wrote negative reviews. Now she owes the surgeon $30K

Scanning QR Codes in Restaurants: Why A Meal May Cost You Your Privacy

Missile Base for Sale

With poor data, deficient requirements and little oversight, massive public spending still hasn’t solved the rural internet access problem

What about the events of the past few weeks has surprised you, and what was the predictable result of Biden’s policy announcement in April?

Many Americans aren’t aware they’re being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

Real Milk, No Cows Necessary

With ‘bounce tracking,’ web-sites can circumvent the cookie blocking built into many browsers.

Is it a stretch to assume that the DOJ decides that all mixers predominately exist to launder money and anybody who participates whatsoever can be charged with conspiracy to facilitate laundering? Does ownership of TORN itself make you susceptible to such charges? Does listing TORN on an exchange?

A letter sent by Digital Agenda committee chairman Manuel Hoferlin claims Apple is treading a “dangerous path” and is undermining “secure and confidential communication,” according to Heise Online. The letter to Cook urges Apple to not implement the system, both to protect society’s data, and to avoid “foreseeable problems” for the company itself.

In March, Petaluma in Sonoma county became the first city in the US to ban future gas station construction or any new pumps on existing sites. In July Sonoma county’s Regional Climate Protection Authority voted to explore ways to support the nine cities in the county considering bans of their own. A final vote on the resolution is scheduled for September.

Apple says researchers can vet its child safety features. But it’s suing a startup that does just that.

This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613. That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.

Now, while the biggest US military failure in our lifetimes is going on—the final dishonorable chapter to a saga sparked by an attack that claimed more American lives than Antietam or Pearl Harbor—both the president and his spokesperson are simply, unbelievably just…not at work. Psaki, who had plenty of time to do Vogue covers and make TikTok videos with influencers, is simply not responding to email and is apparently on vacation. Biden himself hasn’t said or tweeted anything of substance either (as of this writing he’s scheduled a speech this afternoon). The progressive wing of the party in power—Bernie, AOC, the ‘squad’, the whole crew that normally tweets 10 times per day and has opinions on everything—goes absolutely mute when confronted by some hard, inconvenient reality outside the US liberal bubble like Cuba or Afghanistan. As the situation in Afghanistan worsened, the charismatic new face of progressive politics was…enthusing about public libraries. Yay!

Apple’s device surveillance plan is a threat to user privacy — and press freedom

One interesting thing about all this is that the same illiberalism that Orban’s American critics accuse him of is pretty much a fact of life in contemporary America, under liberalism. It can sometimes be worse. In Orban’s Hungary, you are perfectly free to criticize the government’s stance on gender ideology, and you will not have to worry about being cancelled at your job or in any other way. Is that true in the US? Of course not, not for many millions of us.

REUTERS: “The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.”

Free Software NOT as in `free speech,` NOR as in `free beer

End of Social Media

Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps, research finds

Poorly resourced state governments are no match for the lobbying firepower of Apple, the most valuable company in the world.

Five minutes! Such were the demands on the news agenda of the looming coronavirus pandemic in the early spring of 2020. Coverage of all other developments was eclipsed by COVID. The networks had long since given up covering the war as a war. The pandemic meant that they barely paid attention to the prospect of peace.

With “2020 hindsight,” the 2000s housing cycle is not a boom-bust but rather a boom- bust- rebound at both the national level and across cities. We argue this pattern reflects a larger role for fundamentally-rooted explanations than previously thought. We construct a city-level long-run fundamental using a spatial equilibrium regression framework in which house prices are determined by local income, amenities, and supply. The fundamental predicts not only 1997-2019 price and rent growth but also the amplitude of the boom-bust-rebound and foreclosures. This evidence motivates our neo-Kindlebergerian model, in which an improvement in fundamentals triggers a boom-bust-rebound. Agents learn about the fundamentals by observing “dividends” but become over-optimistic due to diagnostic expectations. A bust ensues when over-optimistic beliefs start to correct, exacerbated by a price-foreclosure spiral that drives prices below their long-run level. The rebound follows as prices converge to a path commensurate with higher fundamental growth. The estimated model explains the boom-bust-rebound with a single
fundamental shock and accounts quantitatively and foreclosures.

How Software Is Eating the Car

Chinese state media floats idea of creating a new highly isolated ‘Covid city’ to handle all inbound foreign flights to guard against Covid-19

As the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals recently observed, “it appears that prosecutors worked hand-in-hand with Epstein’s lawyers – or at the very least acceded to their requests – to keep the NPA’s existence and terms hidden from victims.” I lay out this evidence – of prosecutors and federal officials fast-tracking the Epstein NPA, of reaching the NPA before victims were interviewed, of high level DOJ participation in the Epstein deal – because there’s one important question that remains unanswered: Why did the federal government go to these lengths to protect Epstein and his co-conspirators?

Smartphone vendors are struggling to differentiate their products. Apple does this with its hardware/software combination, but none of the other vendors control the Operating System they use. Instead, they are dependent on Google who is seemingly ambivalent about Android. This leaves the AP as one of the few ways these other vendors can differentiate. This point has been hammered home lately as Apple seems to have picked up much (maybe most) of the share opened up by Huawei’s exit. At the same time, pricing for Android phones has come under pressure, see above about the rapid proliferation of 5G phones.

The most recent version has been fancified and crippled. First of all, when you open the app, it doesn’t take you to where you were last reading. It insists on starting with “news of the day” (there are lots of other sites for that stuff) and you have to press “week” to get back into the actual publication. When you do that, even though it knows which articles you’ve read (marking them with a check-mark in the table of contents) it maddeningly doesn’t take you to where you were last. So you have to hunt through the table of contents to get yourself restarted.

Ancestry.com Just Gave Itself the Rights to Your Beloved Family Photos

From Ancient Egypt to the Persian Empire, an ingenious method of catching the breeze kept people cool for millennia. In the search for emissions-free cooling, the “wind catcher” could once again come to our aid.

People are fleeing California for Texas and Idaho; Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are the three states with the most outbound moves.

We rented a California vacation home and got spied on by a surveillance camera

Hacker Says He Found a ‘Tractorload of Vulnerabilities’ at John Deere

In early 2020, the world missed its chance to stop Covid-19. Insight exposes how Beijing’s ten-year takeover of the global health watchdog sowed the seeds of disaster.

The Oregonian: How to pump gas.

The real world is where digital anonymity goes to die. This is also all a bit moot: Apple has deprecated IDFA, and Google will surely do the same with its analogous GAID. Even after Apple forces exchanges like MoPub to use vendor-specific IDs like IDFV, the data will still be joinable within that vendor’s bid stream. That said, cross-vendor and publisher joining of data (like we did in this attack) will be impossible, save for in the fuzziest of ways. We will indeed be in a more privacy-safe future as the incumbents retire the ability to identify and track individual users, but at the expense of any non-incumbent competition. Whoever was hellbent on ruining Burrill will not be able to do so as easily in the future; that said, any entrepreneurs who venture to undermine the Google/Apple duopoly will find themselves similarly hamstrung.

Encryption thus limits governments in a way no legislation can. And as described at length in this piece, it’s not just about protection of private property. It’s about using encryption and crypto to protect freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of contract, prevention from discrimination and cancellation via pseudonymity, individual privacy, and truly equal protection under rule-of-code — even as the State’s paper-based guarantees of the same become ever more hollow.

What’s Trading On Capitol Hill

The lost history of the electric car – and what it tells us about the future of transport

None of this has been scientifically proven.

Investigation shows scale of big food corporations’ market dominance and political power

The Secret to Finding the Best Food in Oaxaca

Despite being the most vaccinated place in Massachusetts, Cape Cod is also seeing the most COVID-19 cases in the state

The Generational Divide in Software Developers

Toyota’s top executives, including billionaire CEO Akio Toyoda, have been on the record calling the trend toward electric vehicles “overhyped” in part because of emissions associated with power plants — which is a favorite talking point used by the oil and gas industry.

Japan pitches ‘Society 5.0’ to keep its edge in tech and science

With several thousand characters to contend with, how were the Japanese able to use typewriters before the advent of digital technology? The answer is the kanji typewriter (????????? or ?????????), which was invented by Kyota Sugimoto in 1915. This invention was deemed so important that it was selected as one of the ten greatest Japanese inventions by the Japanese Patent Office during their 100th anniversary celebrations in 1985. Here are some photos of that first model.

The greatest danger to national security has become the companies that claim to protect it

Charmless city centres and exurban business parks where people only ever went to work may die along with mass commuting.

Blogging is dead. Long live blogging. Or, why the Substack hype is much ado about very little.

A short detour. A few hundred years ago, Cosimo Medici kickstarted a financial empire. At that same time he began a grand tradition of patronage, of Donatello most notably. He kickstarted a tradition where his kids (including Lorenzo the Magnificent, which has to be a nickname he gave himself) provided patronage to Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Advertising has a negative rate of return for more than 80% of brands

In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses. Such assays can facilitate continued testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save both time and resources as we head into influenza season. Laboratories and testing sites should validate and verify their selected assay within their facility before beginning clinical testing.

How can a house just disappear?

High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States after California Energy Bill Limits Sales On High Performance PCs

The money and will of Elon Musk are reshaping a tiny Texas city. Its residents are divided on his vision for SpaceX, but their opinion may not matter at all.

Under the bill, hospitals must get written and verbal consent from patients in order for medical students and other health care providers to do a pelvic exam on a patient who is under general anesthesia. A pelvic exam is the internal and external examination of female reproductive organs, used in routine gynecological check-ups as well as during screening for certain reproductive issues and diseases. Exams on relaxed, unconscious patients give medical students better insight into the area’s anatomy.

One segment of people who have avoided shots is vehemently opposed to the idea. But there is a second group, surveys suggest, that is still deciding.

Mr. Heredia is a 19-year-old volunteer with NYC Mesh, a nonprofit community Wi-Fi initiative, and he was there to install a router that would bring inexpensive Wi-Fi to the building. Mr. Cambridge’s family said they had become fed up with the take-it-or-leave-it pricing for spotty service that internet providers seem to get away with in this part of Brooklyn.

No oil has been found yet around Greenland, but officials there had seen potentially vast reserves as a way to help Greenlanders realize their long-held dream of independence from Denmark by cutting the subsidy of the equivalent of about $680 million Canadian the Danish territory receives from the Danish government every year.

Scottish mountaineering charities have urged hill-walkers not to use Google Maps to guide them up the mountains after a series of incidents where routes downloaded off the internet have resulted in “injury or worse”.

GM just announced that it became the first investor in a project run by Controlled Thermal Resources. CTR will pump hot, salty water from deep below the Salton Sea and extract the lithium from it, along with clean thermo energy at the same time. Cleaner water goes back into the Salton Sea and the ground beneath it. It’s a win-win. You might even add another win in there when you consider the California Energy Commission’s estimate that the Salton Sea area could produce 600,000 tons of lithium per year, which is amazing since the entire world’s industry produced a mere 85,000 tons of lithium in all of 2019

The database ruins all good ideas

A mount of piety is an institutional pawnbroker run as a charity in Europe from Renaissance times until today. Similar institutions were established in the colonies of Catholic countries; the Mexican Nacional Monte de Piedad is still in operation.

Revealed: the true extent of America’s food monopolies, and who pays the price

When a bathroom towel restored an Indian bureaucrat’s pride

Language translation project/company list.

“Winning Is Not Uncomplicated”: Louisa Thomas on Sports

Anticapitalists then shut pipelines (except Russian ones) and suspend drilling leases in parts of Alaska, helping send oil prices above $70. The government says it wants to limit carbon emissions, but then it squashes better energy options like nuclear. On June 30, months after New York state closed the Indian Point nuclear power plant, Mayor Bill de Blasio asked New Yorkers to cut back on energy usage during a heat wave. You can’t make this stuff up.

The CDC failing to use standard operating procedures wasn’t Trump’s fault. The rot is deep.

Do Urgent Care Centers Reduce Medicare Spending?

Officials left dams full to the brim at least 3 weeks long during a rainy period and then failed to undertake a controlled release even when 150 mm of rain were forecast 4 days before the floods.

This is human credulity: the demand for nonsense, not the supply of it.

And of course the package turns out to be a 75-pound bale of cocaine. Falling out of the sky. During a CRIME WATCH MEETING.

Obama increased the tempo of attacks and would, two years later, introduce the novel element of killing American citizens. At first the strikes had been limited to “Al Qaeda and associated forces,” but gradually they were found useful for forces it was extremely hard to argue were associated with Al Qaeda. It was useful, Obama found, to employ drone strikes against the tribal enemies of various governments the U.S. was supporting. It was useful to target not just high-ranking members of various organizations but low-level members; useful to evolve the whole thing from an assassination program to a holistic counterinsurgency machine. In parts of Pakistan, locals had stopped drinking Lipton tea, out of fear that the tea bags were homing devices used by the CIA to attract drones.

Read Giles Coren’s letter to Times subs

If you’ve been in power for a long time and are now in your 70s & 80s? It is simply time to go. That’s not ageism. That’s an IMPLICIT part of the system. We’ve never before remotely had a President & core group this out of touch, this old, and this technically over their heads.

“Rules for thee and not for me” is more than a catch phrase; it is an actual worldview with a history in political control. They are not hypocrites, they are living out their creed.

The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.

Three New Estimates of India’s All-
Cause Excess Mortality during the
COVID-19 Pandemic

Is California’s electric car revolution bad for the planet?

The HQ is in the cloud – Bret Taylor

The lobbyist JEFF RICCHETTI is the brother top BIDEN advisor STEVE RICCHETTI. In the 1st half of 2020 (under TRUMP), Jeff Ricchetti’s firm collected $370k in lobbying fees. In the 1st half of 2021 (under BIDEN), Ricchetti’s firm collected $1.67M in fees.

Has the church caused all this trouble in the world?

SpaceX’s Starlink Review – Four months in

In meat animals, antibiotics often lead to weight gain, sometimes as high as 40% weight gain compared to control, and there’s reason to suspect that this might be linked to the microbiome. Gut microbiota influence energy intakeand body weight in mammals, and even short courses of antibiotics can reduce gut microbiota and increase BMIin humans (though the BMI effect was only seen in some antibiotics).

“and now everyone wants that same level of consumer trust”

A recent survey by YouGov suggested that one in 10 previous users of the app had deleted it, while one in five who still had the app installed had turned off its contact-tracing capabilities.

Retweets don’t get you into power.

Trump’s obsession/focus on a vaccine is nuts. It is totally immaterial to the short-term challenges, which are substantial.

Startup Claims Breakthrough in Long-Duration Batteries

“Bernie Sanders Tells Cuban Protesters To Be More Grateful For Their Excellent Social Programs”

AWS’s hotel California Pricing.

The Incoming Currency War

Researchers are pulling movements out of microfilm with digital history

‘This… research on viruses may not intend to produce “gain-of-function”, although that could be the end result of it.’

These recorded conversations, then, were made available to the participants in four virtual workshops held this spring. Workshop participants represented the diversity of experiences and opinions about election administration and election science: academics (both experts in election science and those new to the area), election officials, technology providers, government officials, and stakeholders. [citizens?]

Why current American politics is less screwed up than you think

Miguel Cardona:

The teaching of civics and history – an opportunity to better understand our past and how our government works so we can engage in and influence our future – has long provided the foundation for students to be active participants in society and help our nation live up to its highest ideals. These values have been championed over the years by Americans of all backgrounds, and they are deeply embedded in our commitment to both patriotism and progress.

One of the ways the Department carries out these efforts is through programs like the American History and Civics grant programs, part of which was first launched in the early 2000’s, authorized in 2017 and supported by bipartisan leaders in the House and Senate. The goal of this program is to improve the quality of American history, civics, and government education in order to provide more students the opportunity to learn about the rich history of our nation and build the skills needed to fully participate in civic life. The program enables higher education institutions, non-profit organizations, and other interested applicants the opportunity to explore innovative and creative ways to support educators and the teaching of history to students, aiming to build a more active, engaged society. This program, however, has not, does not, and will not dictate or recommend specific curriculum be introduced or taught in classrooms. Those decisions are – and will continue to be – made at the local level.

Today the Department is posting the Notices Inviting Applications for this year’s American History and Civics grant competitions. The notices include two priorities that are invitational, meaning they encourage applicants to address topics that are important to the Department. The first invitational priority encourages projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives into teaching and learning. This priority is included because the Department recognizes the value of supporting teaching and learning that reflects the rich diversity, identities, histories, contributions, and experiences of all students. As every parent knows, when students can make personal connections to their learning experiences, there are greater opportunities for them to stay engaged in their education and see pathways for their own futures.