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arkipelagic · 4 months

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The Spanish surnames of many Filipinos have often misled foreigners here and abroad, who are unaware of the decree on the adoption of surnames issued by Governor-General Narciso Clavería in 1849. Until quite recently in the United States, the Filipinos were classified in demographic statistics as a “Spanish-speaking minority,” along with Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, and other nationals of the Central or South American republics. The Philippines, as is well known, was a Spanish colony when Spain was mistress of empires in the Western Hemisphere; but the Americans were “hispanized” demographically, culturally, and linguistically, in a way the Philippines never was. Yet the Spanish surnames of the Filipinos today—García, Gómez, Gutiérrez, Fernández—seem to confirm the impression of the American statistician, as well as of the American tourist, that the Philippines is just another Mexico in Asia. Nor is this misunderstanding confined to the United States; most Spaniards still tend to think of “las Islas Filipinas” as a country united to them through the language of Cervantes, and they catalogue Philippine studies under “Hispano-America.” The fact is that after nearly three-and-a-half centuries of Spanish rule probably not more than one Filipino in ten spoke Spanish, and today scarcely one in fifty does. Still the illusion lives on, thanks in large part to these surnames, which apparently reflect descent from ancient Peninsular forbears, but in reality often date back no farther than this decree of 1849.

Somehow overlooked, this decree, with the Catálogo Alfabético de Apellidos which accompanied it, accounts for another curiousity which often intrigues both Filipinos and foreign visitors alike, namely, that there are towns in which all the surnames of the people begin with the same letter. This is easily verifiable today in many parts of the country. For example, in the Bikol region, the entire alphabet is laid out like a garland over the provinces of Albay, Sorsogon, and Catanduanes which in 1849 belonged to the single jurisdiction of Albay. Beginning with A at the provincial capital, the letters B and C mark the towns along the coast beyond Tabaco to Tiwi. We return and trace along the coast of Sorsogon the letters E to L; then starting down the Iraya Valley at Daraga with M, we stop with S to Polangui and Libon, and finish the alphabet with a quick tour around the island of Catan-duanes. Today’s lists of municipal officials, memorials to local heroes, even business or telephone directories, also show that towns where family names begin with a single letter are not uncommon. In as, for example, the letter R is so prevalent that besides the Roas, Reburianos, Rebajantes, etc., some claim with tongue in cheek that the town also produced Romuáldez, Rizal, and Roosevelt!

Excerpt from the 1973 introduction to Catálogo de Alfabético de Apellidos by Domingo Abella

#philippines #southeast asia #spanish colonialism #colonialism #history #x

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fatliberation · 27 days

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hi, i'm a fat person who is just starting to learn to love and appreciate my body and i'm very new to the fat community and all that.

i was wondering if you could maybe explain the term ob*se and how it is a slur. i've never heard anything about it being a slur before(like i said, i'm very new here) and was wondering if you could tell me the origin and history of the word or mayy provide links to resources about it? i want to know more about fat history and how to support my community but i'm unsure of how to start

Welcome!

Obesity is recognized as a slur by fat communities because it's a stigmatizing term that medicalizes fat bodies, typically in the absence of disease. Aside from the word literally translating to "having eaten oneself fat" in latin, obesity (as a medical diagnosis) straight up doesn't actually exist. The only measure that we have to diagnose people with obesity is the BMI, which has been widely proven to be an ineffective measure of health.

The BMI was created in the 1800s by a statistician named Adolphe Quetelet, who did NOT sudy medicine, to gather statistics of the average height and weight of ONLY white, european, upper-middle class men to assist the government in allocating resources. It was never intended as a measure of individual body fat, build, or health.

Quetelet is also credited with founding the field of anthropometry, including the racist pseudoscience of phrenology. Quetelet’s l’homme moyen would be used as a measurement of fitness to parent, and as a scientific justification for eugenics.

Studies have observed that about 30% of so-called "normal weight" people are "unhealthy" whereas about 50% of so-called "overweight" people are “healthy”. Thus, using the BMI as an indicator of health results in the misclassification of some 75 million people in the United States alone. "Healthy" lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.

While epidemiologists use BMI to calculate national "obesity" rates, the distinctions can be arbitrary. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Americans as "overweight" overnight—to match international guidelines. Articles about the "obesity epidemic" often use this pseudo-statistic to create a false fear mongering rate at which the United States is becoming fatter. Critics have also noted that those guidelines were drafted in part by the International Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight loss drugs. Interesting!!!

So... how can you diagnose a person with a disease (and sell them medications) solely based upon an outdated measure that was never meant to indicate health in the first place? Especially when "obesity” has no proven causative role in the onset of any chronic condition?

There is a reason as to why fatness was declared a disease by the NIH in 1998, and some of it had to do with acknowledging fatness as something that is NOT just about a lack of willpower - but that's a very complicated post for another time. You can learn more about it in the two part series of Maintenance Phase titled The Body Mass Index and The Obesity Epidemic.

Aside from being overtly incorrect as a medical tool, the BMI is used to deny certain medical treatments and gender-affirming care, as well insurance coverage. Employers still often offer bonuses to workers who lower their BMI. Although science recognizes the BMI as deeply flawed, it's going to be tough to get rid of. It has been a long standing and effective tool for the oppression of fat people and the profit of the weight loss industry.

More sources and extra reading material:

How the Use of BMI Fetishizes White Embodiment and Racializes Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMI by Aubrey Gordon

The Racist and Problematic History of the Body Mass Index by Adele Jackson-Gibson

What's Wrong With The War on Obesity? by Lily O'Hara, et al.

Fearing The Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

#inbox #resources #the bmi is bullshit #fat liberation #fat acceptance #fat activism #bmi #medical fatphobia

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girlactionfigure · 29 days

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abbasez

The United Nations seemingly halved the estimated number of women and children killed in Gaza, according to UN data published on May 6 and 8. On May 6, the UN published data showing that 34,735 people had reportedly been killed in Gaza, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children. On May 8, the UN published data showing 34,844 people had reportedly been killed, including 4,959 women and 7,797 children. The new figures showed the number of identified deaths as of April 30, which total 24,686 people; the new data also specified that 10,006 men had been killed and 1,924 elderly. (Israel puts the number of male combatants killed at approx. 14,000.) This comes after months of accusations by leading statisticians that the numbers produced by the Gazan authorities cannot possibly be accurate. Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a report in January that showed major discrepancies in the fatality reports. They concluded such discrepancies were most likely caused by manipulation. Professor Abraham Wyner also told Tablet Magazine that the rate of deaths was very unnatural and climbed far too regularly. He claimed that in war, deaths should be irregular as the intensity of war is irregular, but that the death numbers climbed by 270 plus/minus 15%, which he says is statistically impossible.

#Gaza #Israel #Hamas #UN #israelhamaswar

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memecucker · 2 years

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The family tree of humanity is much more interconnected than we tend to think. “We’re culturally bound and psychologically conditioned to not think about ancestry in very broad terms,” Rutherford says. Genealogists can only focus on one branch of a family tree at a time, making it easy to forget how many forebears each of us has.

Imagine counting all your ancestors as you trace your family tree back in time. In the nth generation before the present, your family tree has 2n slots: two for parents, four for grandparents, eight for great-grandparents, and so on. The number of slots grows exponentially. By the 33rd generation—about 800 to 1,000 years ago—you have more than eight billion of them. That is more than the number of people alive today, and it is certainly a much larger figure than the world population a millennium ago.

This seeming paradox has a simple resolution: “Branches of your family tree don’t consistently diverge,” Rutherford says. Instead “they begin to loop back into each other.” As a result, many of your ancestors occupy multiple slots in your family tree. For example, “your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might have also been your great-great-great-great-aunt,” he explains.

The consequence of humanity being “incredibly inbred” is that we are all related much more closely than our intuition suggests, Rutherford says. Take, for instance, the last person from whom everyone on the planet today is descended. In 2004 mathematical modeling and computer simulations by a group of statisticians led by Douglas Rohde, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that our most recent common ancestor probably lived no earlier than 1400 B.C. and possibly as recently as A.D. 55. In the time of Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti, someone from whom we are all descended was likely alive somewhere in the world.

Go back a bit further, and you reach a date when our family trees share not just one ancestor in common but every ancestor in common. At this date, called the genetic isopoint, the family trees of any two people on the earth now, no matter how distantly related they seem, trace back to the same set of individuals. “If you were alive at the genetic isopoint, then you are the ancestor of either everyone alive today or no one alive today,” Rutherford says. Humans left Africa and began dispersing throughout the world at least 120,000 years ago, but the genetic isopoint occurred much more recently—somewhere between 5300 and 2200 B.C., according to Rohde’s calculations.

At first glance, these dates may seem much too recent to account for long-isolated Indigenous communities in South America and elsewhere. But “genetic information spreads rapidly through generational time,” Rutherford explains. Beginning in 1492, “you begin to see the European genes flowing in every direction until our estimates are that there are no people in South America today who don’t have European ancestry.”

In fact, even more recent than the global genetic isopoint is the one for people with recent European ancestry. Researchers using genomic data place the latter date around A.D. 1000. So Christopher Lee’s royal lineage is unexceptional: because Charlemagne lived before the isopoint and has living descendants, everyone with European ancestry is directly descended from him. In a similar vein, nearly everyone with Jewish ancestry, whether Ashkenazic or Sephardic, has ancestors who were expelled from Spain beginning in 1492. “It’s a very nice example of a small world but looking to the past,” says Susanna Manrubia, a theoretical evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology.

Not everyone of European ancestry carries genes passed down by Charlemagne, however. Nor does every Jew carry genes from their Sephardic ancestors expelled from Spain. People are more closely related genealogically than genetically for a simple mathematical reason: a given gene is passed down to a child by only one parent, not both. In a simple statistical model, Manrubia and her colleagues showed that the average number of generations separating two random present-day individuals from a common genealogical ancestor depends on the logarithm of the relevant population’s size. For large populations, this number is much smaller than the population size itself because the number of possible genealogical connections between individuals doubles with each preceding generation. By contrast, the average number of generations separating two random present-day individuals from a common genetic ancestor is linearly proportional to the population size because each gene can be traced through only one line of a person’s family tree. Although Manrubia’s model unrealistically assumed the population size did not change with time, the results still apply in the real world, she says.

Because of the random reshuffling of genes in each successive generation, some of your ancestors contribute disproportionately to your genome, while others contribute nothing at all. According to calculations by geneticist Graham Coop of the University of California, Davis, you carry genes from fewer than half of your forebears from 11 generations back. Still, all the genes present in today’s human population can be traced to the people alive at the genetic isopoint. “If you are interested in what your ancestors have contributed to the present time, you have to look at the population of all the people that coexist with you,” Manrubia says. “All of them carry the genes of your ancestors because we share the [same] ancestors.”

And because the genetic isopoint occurred so recently, Rutherford says, “in relation to race, it absolutely, categorically demolishes the idea of lineage purity.” No person has forebears from just one ethnic background or region of the world. And your genealogical connections to the entire globe mean that not too long ago your ancestors were involved in every event in world history.

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jessicamessicavillageofspillage · 7 months

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Apparently transpeople will also die from the inaccurate recording of Sex within statistics

The collection of data on a person’s sex – that is, whether they are male or female – has become controversial in recent years, and a number of public bodies have moved away from collecting data on sex as a result. For example, Scotland’s chief statistician recently issued guidance stating that data on sex should only be collected in exceptional circumstances. This move has been greeted with alarm by quantitative social scientists who believe that data on sex is vitally important and that data on both gender identity and sex is needed.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) was also embroiled in controversy when it proposed to guide respondents to the 2021 England and Wales census that they may answer the sex question in terms of their subjective gender identity, rather than their sex. This was despite the fact that the 2021 census also included a new separate question on gender identity. The ONS was forced to change its proposed guidance on the sex question by a judicial review and went on to advise that people should answer the first question to reflect their legal sex. The Scottish census authorities have been criticised for disregarding the implications of that judgment.

Statistics on employment, health, crime and education have all been affected by this trend.

The Government Equalities Office has issued guidance to employers who are legally bound to report on their gender pay gap to provide data on their employees’ gender identity, not their sex, and to exclude employees who “do not identify as ‘men’ or ‘women’” from the data. This makes it impossible to assess whether natal males who identify as trans or non-binary may have different labour-market experiences from natal females who identify as trans or non-binary. Yet non-binary or transgender identification may not protect females from discrimination, for example, on the basis of pregnancy or maternity or the perceived risk of becoming pregnant.

The NHS decides who to call for routine medical screenings based on the gender marker a person has recorded with their GP rather than their sex as recorded as birth. The NHS’s failure to record biological sex on patient records has led to trans patients not being called in for screening for conditions that may affect them due to their sex, such as ovarian cancer or prostate cancer. If trans patients are not screened for such conditions, the consequences are potentially fatal. The use of gender identity rather than sex has also led to confusion for some trans patients attempting to use sexual health services.

Freedom of information requests have revealed that multiple police forces in England now record crimes by male suspects as committed by women if the perpetrator requests to be recorded as such. Even small numbers of cases misclassified in this way can lead to substantial bias in crime statistics.

Differences between the sexes are an important factor for analysis in most, if not all, of the areas that social and health scientists address. Sex, alongside age, is a fundamental demographic variable, vital for projections regarding fertility and life expectancy. Sex has systematic effects on physical health and is also linked to mental health. And the importance of sex extends to all aspects of social life, including employment, education and crime.

We know that many differences between the sexes have changed dramatically over time – education and labour market participation are two examples. Without consistent data on sex, social scientists would not be able to track this change over time or to understand whether efforts to improve the representation of women and girls in domains where they are underrepresented have been effective.

We have been losing data on sex, as public sector bodies have switched to collecting data on gender identity instead. But the tide may have turned. The UK Statistics Authority has recently published guidance that recommends that “sex, age and ethnic group should be routinely collected and reported in all administrative data and in-service process data, including statistics collected within health and care settings and by police, courts and prisons”. It also says data producers should clearly distinguish between concepts such as sex, gender and gender identity.

Both people’s material circumstances and their identities are important to their lives. We know that sex matters, and we have much to learn about the ways in which gender identity matters, too. Rather than removing data on sex, we should collect data on both sex and gender identity, in order to develop a better understanding of the influence of both of these factors and the intersection between them.

Original article in The Conversation

Professor Alice Sullivan’s academic profile

UCL Social Research Institute

#social science #data #Erasure of equality measures for everyone #radblr #radical feminism

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naturalrights-retard · 6 months

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By Frank Bergman December 5, 2023

A New Zealand government whistleblower is now facing up to seven years in prison after being arrested for going public with data exposing the country’s mass deaths among the Covid-vaccinated population.

As Slay News has been reporting, Barry Young, a lead database administrator for New Zealand’s public health ministry, Te Whatu Ora, leaked explosive secret government data on the death rates of people who have received Covid mRNA shots.

Identifying himself as “Winston Smith,” Young released data showing that vast numbers of vaxxed New Zealanders are now dead.

The whistleblower exposed official government data that shows the nation’s spike in excess deaths is associated with the Covid injection campaign.

According to the statistician whistleblower’s explosive official data, more than 20% of the nation’s citizens have now died after receiving their Covid mRNA shots.

Like many other countries around the world, New Zealand has suffered an unprecedented spike in excess deaths over the past two years.

Due to strict mandates and heavy government pressure during the Covid pandemic, the vast majority of the New Zealand population is fully vaccinated.

Official data shows that 95.8% of the eligible New Zealand population aged 12 and over have received one dose of the Covid mRNA shots.

While a staggering 94.7% of the eligible New Zealand population aged 12 and over are considered to be fully vaccinated.

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eelhound · 1 year

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"If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence. The Gross National Product may rise rapidly as measured by statisticians but not as experienced by actual people, who find themselves oppressed by increasing frustration, alienation, insecurity, and so forth.

After a while, even the Gross National Product refuses to rise any further, not because of scientific or technological failure, but because of a creeping paralysis of non-cooperation, as expressed in various types of escapism on the part, not only of the oppressed and exploited, but even of highly privileged groups."

- E.F. Schumacher, from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, 1973.

#e.f. schumacher #quote #quotations #well being #anthropology #gross national product #democratic socialism #politics #intelligence #economics #greed #envy #capitalism #escapism

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howieabel · 2 months

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“I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst - those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and "experts" without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though....” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

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simply-ivanka · 6 months

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Official data shows that 95.8% of the eligible New Zealand population aged 12 and over have received one dose of the Covid mRNA shots.

While a staggering 94.7% of the eligible New Zealand population aged 12 and over are considered to be fully vaccinated.

A New Zealand government database administrator, who helped to catalog official data on vaccine recipients, has come forward with explosive information.

The whistleblower has exposed official government data that shows the nation’s spike in excess deaths is associated with the Covid injection campaign.

According to the statistician whistleblower, who called himself “Winston Smith,” vast numbers of vaxxed New Zealanders are now dead.

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worldstatisticsday · 3 months

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6th Meeting - 55th Statistical Commission.

The Statistical Commission consists of 24 member countries of the United Nations, elected by the United Nations Economic and Social Council on the basis of an equitable geographical distribution. The term of office of members is four years.

The 55th session of the United Nations Statistical Commission is scheduled to be held in New York from 27 February - 1 March 2024.

Watch the 6th Meeting - 55th Statistical Commission!

#statistical data #data statistics #statistics #statisticians #united nations statistics division #un55sc #data governance #United Nations Economic and Social Council

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nicklloydnow · 7 months

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“This is not an all-out war but a decentralized one with seemingly unconnected fronts that span across continents. It is fought in a hybrid style, meaning both with tanks and planes and with disinformation campaigns, political interference, and cyberwarfare. The strategy blurs the lines between war and peace and combatants and civilians. It puts a lot of extra fog in the "fog of war."

China, Russia, and Iran disagree on many things, but they all have the same goal: ridding their regions of U.S. influence and creating a multipolar global governance system and Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow know that U.S. political and military might is the only force preventing them from imposing their will on their neighbors.

(…)

When it comes to this war, the United States is asleep at the wheel. U.S. strategy has been about preparation for a large conventional war, containment, and weak deterrence. Washington has been pitifully absent in the irregular warfare field. There are almost no punishments or accountability—besides ineffective sanctions—for the nations that attack us.

(…)

Should the Biden administration continue its ineffective course, these countries will only be emboldened. Should support for Israel or Ukraine fail, China will be more likely to invade Taiwan. Deterrence is a great strategy but only works when the other side believes you will carry out your threats. You must establish that understanding by holding your enemies accountable for moves they take against you.

(…)

The Biden administration's support for Ukraine has been a rare show of force that has sent a strong message to the world. But it isn't enough. The U.S. foreign policy establishment must recognize the hybrid war being waged against it and show up on the irregular field of battle. Like it or not, the United States is the guarantor of stability in the world. By retreating from its responsibilities, the only thing Washington is guaranteeing is dark times ahead.”

“The list encompasses not just the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, but hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, Serbian military measures against Kosovo, fighting in Eastern Congo, complete turmoil in Sudan since April, and a fragile cease-fire in Tigray that Ethiopia seems poised to break at any time. Syria and Yemen have not exactly been quiet during this period, and gangs and cartels continuously menace governments, including those in Haiti and Mexico. All of this comes on top of the prospect of a major war breaking out in East Asia, such as by China invading the island of Taiwan.

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which has been tracking wars globally since 1945, identified 2022 and 2023 as the most conflictual years in the world since the end of the Cold War. Back in January 2023, before many of the above conflicts erupted, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed sounded the alarm, noting that peace “is now under grave threat” across the globe. The seeming cascade of conflict gives rise to one obvious question: Why?

(…)

The first explanation holds that the cascade is in the eye of the beholder. People are too easily “fooled by randomness,” the essayist and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb admonished in his 2001 book of the same title, seeking intentional explanations for what may be coincidence. The flurry of armed confrontations could be just such a phenomenon, concealing no deeper meaning: Some of the frozen conflicts, for instance, were due for flare-ups or had gone quiet only recently. Today’s volume of wars, in other words, should be viewed as little more than a series of unfortunate events that could recur or worsen at any time.

(…)

Although coincidences certainly do occur, the current onslaught happens to be taking place at a time of big changes in the international system. The era of Pax Americana appears to be over, and the United States is no longer poised to police the world. Not that Pax Americana was necessarily so peaceful. The 1990s were especially disputatious; civil wars arose on multiple continents, as did major wars in Europe and Africa. But the United States attempted to solve and contain many potential conflicts: Washington led a coalition to oust Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from Kuwait, facilitated the Oslo Process to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fostered improved relations between North and South Korea, and encouraged the growth of peacekeeping operations around the globe. Even following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the invasion of Afghanistan was supported by many in the international community as necessary to remove a pariah regime and enable a long-troubled nation to rebuild. War was not over, but humanity seemed closer than ever to finding a formula for lasting peace.

Over the subsequent decades, the United States seemed to fritter away both the goodwill needed to support such efforts and the means to carry them out. By the early 2010s, the United States was bogged down in two losing wars and recovering from a financial crisis. The world, too, had changed, with power ebbing from Washington’s singular pole to multiple emerging powers. As then–Secretary of State John Kerry remarked in a 2013 interview in The Atlantic, “We live in a world more like the 18th and 19th centuries.” And a multipolar world, where several great powers jostle for advantage on the global stage, harbors the potential for more conflicts, large and small.

Specifically, China has emerged as a great power seeking to influence the international system, whether by leveraging the economic allure of its Belt and Road Initiative or by militarily revising the status quo within its region. Russia does not have China’s economic muscle, but it, too, seeks to dominate its region, establish itself as an influential global player, and revise the international order. Whether Russia or China is yet on an economic or military par with the United States hardly matters. Both are strong enough to challenge the U.S.-led international order by leveraging the revisionist sentiment they share with countries throughout the global South.

(…)

Suppose, though, that the proliferation of wars doesn’t have a systemic cause, but an entirely particular one. That the world owes its present state of unrest directly to Russia—and, even more specifically, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 and its decision to continue fighting since.

The war in Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since World War II and one poised to continue well past 2024, is absorbing the attention of international actors who otherwise would have been well positioned to prevent any of the abovementioned crises from escalating. This case is not the same as the great-power distraction, in which the world’s most powerful states simply fail to focus on emerging crises. Rather, the great powers lack the diplomatic and military capacity to respond to conflicts beyond Ukraine—and other actors know it.

(…)

These three explanations—coincidence, multipolarity, Russia’s war in Ukraine—are not mutually exclusive. If anything, they are interrelated, as wars are complex events; the decline of U.S. hegemony contributes to growing multipolarity; and great-power competition has surely fed Russia’s aggression and the West’s response. The consequence is that others are caught in the great-power cross fire or will seek to start fires of their own. Even if none of these wars rise to the level of a third world war, they will be devastating all the same. We do not need to be in a world war to be in a world at war.

Wars were already a persistent feature of the international system. But they were not widespread. War was always happening somewhere, in other words, but war was not happening everywhere. The above dynamics could change that tendency. The prevalence of war, not just its persistence, could now be our future.”

#world war 3 #wwiii #russia #ukraine #israel #hamas #iran #china #taiwan #deterrence

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sub-at-omicsteminist · 1 year

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Beatrice Aitchison

Beatrice Aitchison was an American mathematician, statistician, and transportation economist who directed the Transport Economics Division of the United States Department of Commerce, and later became the top woman in the United States Postal Service and the first policy-level appointee there. The United States Civil Service Commission gave Aitchison one of its first Federal Woman's Awards in 1961 chosen from a field of more than 25,000, a piece of recognition that gave Aitchison leverage to push President Lyndon Johnson into drafting an executive order banning sex discrimination in the U.S. government. In 1965, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association "for pioneering work in the development and application of statistical methods for research and analysis in traffic and transportation." She won the Career Service Award of the National Civil Service League in 1970. In 1997, the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association gave her their Woodrow Wilson Award "for outstanding government service"

#stem #maths #stemblr #mathematics #women in stem #sub-at-omicsteminist #women in math #math #mathblr

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lansplaining · 1 year

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(found this in my drafts and I’m not sure if I’ll keep going with it or not, but I liked this opening, so here is the beginning of a silly women’s soccer wangxian AU)

There is simply no question about it, in the end. Lan Zhan gets a masters, partly because her uncle thinks she should and partly because it buys her another two years of playing time. Maybe if she had a realistic shot at the national team, the conversation would be different, but competition for keepers is brutal, and the current starters are still young. Lan Zhan will be the skip generation: too old, by the time the current set retire, not to be overlooked for the promising up-and-comers a cohort below her.

“This new league…” says Lan Huan gently, but Lan Zhan shakes her head and rolls her eyes and says in her uncle’s voice, “Even the top salaries for players who aren’t on the national team aren’t enough to live off of. And it will just fold like the last league.”

Neither of them point out that generations of players have made do while working other jobs. But they are Lans. Lans do not make ends meet: Lans succeed. Lans are not struggling semi-professional athletes, they are sensible, elegant things that pay well and do not raise eyebrows at parties. It is at 22 that Lan Zhan realizes sometimes, generations of success are upheld by quitting before you can fail.

“You can still play recreationally,” says Lan Huan, who plays the flute in a community group and is the best player by an embarrassing distance, with a sad smile.

So Lan Zhan turns to the thing she always liked second-best (besides music; as Lan Huan has demonstrated, that does not count) and becomes a statistician.

Wei Ying’s problem has always been that she doesn’t ask enough questions. She just does things. Waiting for explanations is boring, and they rarely succeed in changing her mind anyway. Does she know what Uncle Jiang and Aunt Yu would say about her entering the college draft for a brand-new, likely-to-fold-like-the-last-one professional women’s soccer league instead of focusing on her studies? Well, she can guess. So why listen to it out loud when she could already hear it in her head? She just has to see what will happen.

What happens is, she’s picked near the end of the first round. First-round draft pick Wei Ying. It’s a phrase the Jiangs’ friends can understand, and so they give their grudging blessing, not that Wei Ying needs it, since Aunt Yu assures her they’ll be providing no financial assistance anyway, so what exactly did she stand to lose if she defied them? Contact with A-Cheng and A-Li, maybe. Best not to risk it, since she doesn’t have to.

What happens is, she probably should have cut ties with the Jiangs back when it would have been easy, since it happens anyway, and is messy and hard until she makes it easy by asking to be traded to a new team and getting a new phone. And then she tears her ACL on said team’s shitty turf pitch and then the team folds at the end of that season and blah blah rehab, blah blah medical debt. It’s supposed to be impossible to lose track of people in the modern world, but it turns out it’s pretty easy.

She ends up on a new team eventually and her sisters track her down, and after A-Li gets married she ends up in the same city and Wei Ying lives in her big sister’s spare bedroom to save money on rent and it’s all pretty great. And then she gets traded, because that’s what happens when you don’t have a national team contract to give you a bit of leverage, and she gets ready to do it all again: new apartment, new friends, new part-time job.

“Are you sure it’s worth it, Yingying?” A-Li asks worriedly as Wei Ying shoves her stuff haphazardly into her backpack, because they’re running late and she just found a whole drawer she forgot to pack and A-Li offered to mail it but honestly it’s mostly underwear and she’s gonna need that. “Zixuan could help you find a job here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Wei Ying says, shoving a thong into the side pocket of her backpack alongside some spare shin guards and deciding to just hope it doesn’t fall out in public. “I love this.”

Lan Zhan has been living in her big sister’s spare bedroom for two weeks while Lan Huan spends a few months helping establish a new branch of her company in Ireland when she is forced to break their pattern of weekly video calls.

“There is someone coming,” Lan Zhan says.

“I… see?” Lan Huan says uncertainly.

“A soccer player. They said you signed up to host a player for the season and she is on her way.”

Lan Huan’s eyes go wide. She searches through her emails and finds it, shares her screen so Lan Zhan can see: the email a week ago asking if she’s still interested in hosting a player, the affirmative reply she sent in what she now recognizes was a jetlagged daze at 2:15 AM GMT.

“I’m so, so, sorry,” says Lan Huan. “If you can give me until Monday, I can call them and figure something out.”

“She is arriving today,” Lan Zhan says. “You do not mind if I give her your room?”

“No, of course not,” says Lan Huan. “She’ll be exhausted, she can’t just sleep on the couch. You can put up with it for a weekend, can’t you?”

“Of course,” says Lan Zhan, trying not to sigh. It isn’t-- well, it is Lan Huan’s fault, but-- not in a way where Lan Zhan can really blame her. “You didn’t mention you had signed up for this program.”

“Oh, yes.” Lan Huan looks sheepish. “I have season tickets, actually. And then Mingjue told me they were looking for host families and I thought it sounded fun… that was before you moved back to town, of course, and then the season started and they hadn’t reached out, so I forgot about it. We can go to a game, once I’m back, if you’d like…?”

It all makes sense, now. Lan Zhan cut soccer firmly and completely out of her life once she stopped playing. It makes sense Lan Huan took that to mean it was a topic she should not mention. Lan Zhan sometimes forgets how fragile her older sister thinks she is.

“Mn,” says Lan Zhan. “I will check in on Monday. I should make sure I have things prepared for the weekend.”

“I’m really sorry,” Lan Huan says again. “Try to be nice. It’s just for a weekend.”

“Her name is uhhhhh…” The nice blonde-haired lady who picked Wei Ying up from the airport flicks through her phone once they’re stopped at a red light. “Anne! Anne Lan. Ha, it rhymes.”

Wei Ying suspects that in fact it doesn’t, but she doesn’t say so. Instead she says, “Awesome. I’m looking forward to meeting her.”

“Season ticket holder-- oh wow, since the team started, eight years, that’s nice-- non-smoker, no pets--”

“Oh, good,” Wei Ying says. She doesn’t mind cats, but a blanket ‘no pets’ seems simpler.

“Really good location. You could probably walk to the stadium if you wanted. Or bike, but the coaches’ll probably try to talk you out of that, kind of dangerous…”

Wei Ying is incapable of not holding up her end of the conversation, even though she’s exhausted from the flight and absolutely starving. She almost convinces herself she’s struck up enough of a rapport to ask the lady-- Tessa-- to take them to a drive-through, but then they pull off of the freeway into a residential area, and Tessa says they’re almost there. Wei Ying flips down the mirror on the sun screen to see if there’s anything she can do about, like, her face, and then decides it’s a lost cause and flips it back up again.

“Oooookay,” says Tessa as they pull in front of a lovely little powder-blue house on a lovely little residential street. The houses are all Victorians of varying sizes: this one is tiny, a cute little dollhouse of a place with a postage-stamp yard and a flowering dogwood tree. “You want me to come in with you, or…?”

“Nah, nah, I got it,” says Wei Ying, hoisting her backpack onto her shoulder as she opens the door. “My flight was already late, it’s almost dinnertime! Just pop the trunk for me and I’ll get my bag. I’ll see you at the match tomorrow?”

“Yep!” says Tessa brightly. “Everyone’s really looking forward to meeting you. Don’t hesitate to call me if there’s anything you need.”

Tessa pulls away and Wei Ying drags her stuff up the steps and onto the little porch. She thinks maybe the clunk-clunk-clunk of her wheelie suitcase on the perfect little steps will draw attention, but the door’s still shut when she reaches it, so she rings the bell. The curtains are drawn across the front window, but the lights seem to be out. Hm.

“Forgive me,” comes a low voice from behind her. “I was delayed at the store.”

Wei Ying turns, smile ready. “Anne? Hi! I-- woah. No.” She stops. “Shit. I know you.”

Lan-- Lan-- Lan.

“Lan Zhan!” She breaks into a brilliant smile. “Do you remember me?!”

Lan Zhan tightens her hands around the handles of her grocery bags. “Wei Ying.”

So, back up.

Lan Zhan plays for Stanford, Wei Ying for USC. Wei Ying is the bane of Lan Zhan’s life. Wei Ying breaks Lan Zhan’s first streak of clean sheets, and Lan Zhan never forgives her. She doesn’t know if Wei Ying ever thinks about her, but she thinks about Wei Ying, how she can make sure this preening, recklessly fouling, defense-neglecting midfielder can never score on her again.

Lots of people probably think about Wei Ying that way, Lan Zhan assumes. She’s a talent, someone whose name comes up, someone who is considered a future national team prospect, a future Olympian, a future star.

Then she saves a penalty from Wei Ying, and she can at least rest confident that Wei Ying is occasionally thinking about her, too.

Obviously Lan Zhan can’t have known that Wei Ying was talking shit to Jiang Cheng just that morning about how she’s never missed a penalty, about how it’s all about confidence, about how she has an unbeatable technique.

Even worse, Wei Ying can just tell from the way she’s seen Lan Zhan play and the things people say about her that if she had known, she would have tried even harder to save it. And God, fine, it was an amazing save-- she guessed right and fucking leapt, full-stretch, and palmed it down to the ground then crumpled herself on top of it in that keeper defensive posture that honestly Wei Ying finds so cute even when it’s depriving her of the chance to at least score on the fucking rebound and preserve some of her dignity.

So yeah, after that, she’s out for revenge.

“This is insane,” says Wei Ying once she’s settled on the couch. “You go by Anne now?”

“My sister’s English name,” says Lan Zhan. “This is her house. She signed up for the program. I only moved here a month ago.”

“That’s perfect!” Wei Ying cries. “We can explore the city together. I actually almost came up here for college, but my family wanted a bigger name for my degree. And USC was awesome, to be fair. Or, wait, did you grow up here?”

“No,” says Lan Zhan. “Seattle.”

“West Coast lifer! I’ve been in Orlando ‘til now. I know,” she adds, though Lan Zhan is almost certain she did not make any particular reaction. “But my sister was living there, so that was nice. I mean, if I got married to someone and then they made me move to Florida, like, that would be a deal-breaker. I’m so excited to have seasons again.” She spreads her hands and beams. “Your turn. Where have you been since Stanford?”

“I-- remained at Stanford for my master’s. I then took a job in Silicon Valley. I now have a new job here, with the city.”

“Shit,” says Wei Ying. “So you’re like… rich, hot, and successful. Good to know.”

“You are a professional athlete,” Lan Zhan cannot help but point out. “You are also successful.” And hot, she does not say.

“This is so great,” Wei Ying says, ignoring this entirely. “I love people, but I was getting a little freaked out at the idea of living with just some complete stranger, as a favor, you know? But this is amazing!”

“You should shower, and put away your things,” Lan Zhan says, completely overwhelmed by the idea that Wei Ying does not consider her a stranger. What constitutes a stranger if not a woman you played against a handful of times nearly ten years ago? “You must be tired. I will start dinner.”

When Wei Ying has disappeared into Lan Huan’s room, Lan Zhan types a very quick text: Do not worry about contacting the team. I do not wish to inconvenience them or the player. I do not mind if she stays.

She sends it before she can change her mind.

#my fic

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 11 months

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Scientists detect sign that a crucial ocean current is near collapse

By Sarah Kaplan

The Atlantic Ocean’s sensitive circulation system has become slower and less resilient, according to a new analysis of 150 years of temperature data — raising the possibility that this crucial element of the climate system could collapse within the next few decades.

Scientists have long seen the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, as one of the planet’s most vulnerable “tipping elements” —meaning the system could undergo an abrupt and irreversible change, with dramatic consequences for the rest of the globe. Under Earth’s current climate, this aquatic conveyor belt transports warm, salty water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, and then sends colder water back south along the ocean floor. But as rising global temperatures melt Arctic ice, the resulting influx of cold freshwater has thrown a wrench in the system — and could shut it down entirely.

The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that continued warming will push the AMOC over its “tipping point” around the middle of this century. The shift would be as abrupt and irreversible as turning off a light switch, and it could lead to dramatic changes in weather on either side of the Atlantic.

“This is a really worrying result,” said Peter Ditlevsen, a climate physicist at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the new study. “This is really showing we need a hard foot on the brake” of greenhouse gas emissions.

Ditlevsen’s analysis is at odds with the most recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which drew on multiple climate models and concluded with “medium confidence” that the AMOC will not fully collapse this century.

Other experts on the AMOC also cautioned that because the new study doesn’t present new observations of the entire ocean system — instead, it is extrapolating about the future based on past data from a limited region of the Atlantic — its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt.

“The qualitative statement that AMOC has been losing stability in the last century remains true even taking all uncertainties into account,” said Niklas Boers, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “But the uncertainties are too high for a reliable estimate of the time of AMOC tipping.”

The new study adds to a growing body of evidence that this crucial ocean system is in peril. Since 2004, observations from a network of ocean buoys has showed the AMOC getting weaker — though the limited time frame of that data set makes it hard to establish a trend. Scientists have also analyzed multiple “proxy” indicators of the current’s strength, including microscopic organisms and tiny sediments from the seafloor, to show the system is in its weakest state in more than 1,000 years.

For their analysis, Peter Ditlevsen and his colleague Susanne Ditlevsen (who is Peter’s sister) examined records of sea surface temperatures going back to 1870. In recent years, they found, temperatures in the northernmost waters of the Atlantic have undergone bigger fluctuations and taken longer to return to normal. These are “early warning signals” that the AMOC is becoming critically unstable, the scientists said — like the increasingly wild wobbles before a tower of Jenga blocks starts to fall.

Susanne Ditlevsen, a statistician at the University of Copenhagen, then developed an advanced mathematical model to predict how much more wobbling the AMOC system can handle. The results suggest that the AMOC could collapse any time between now and 2095, and as early as 2025, the authors said.

The consequences would not be nearly as dire as they appear in the 2004 sci-fi film “The Day After Tomorrow,” in which a sudden shutdown of the current causes a flash freeze across the northern hemisphere. But it could lead to a drop in temperatures in northern Europe and elevated warming in the tropics, Peter Ditlevsen said, as well as stronger storms on the East Coast of North America.

Marilena Oltmanns, an oceanographer at the National Oceanography Center in Britain, noted in a statement that the temperatures in the north Atlantic are “only one part of a highly complex, dynamical system.” Though her own research on marine physics supports the Ditlevsens’ conclusion that this particular region could reach a tipping point this century, she is wary of linking that transition to a full-scale change in Atlantic Ocean circulation.

Yet the dangers of even a partial AMOC shutdown mean any indicators of instability are worth investigating, said Stefan Rahmstorf, another oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute who was not involved in the new study.

“As always in science, a single study provides limited evidence, but when multiple approaches lead to similar conclusions this must be taken very seriously,” he said. “The scientific evidence now is that we can’t even rule out crossing a tipping point already in the next decade or two.”

Chris Mooney contributed to this report.

[Washington Post]

#oceans #the sea #climate emergency #Washington Post #Sarah Kaplan

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