Elsewhere for June 8, 2019


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You should read this for 6/8/2019:

Art, Music, and Film

Metadata Is The Biggest Little Problem Plaguing The Music Industry “It’s a crisis that has left, by some estimations, billions on the table unpaid to musicians.”

The problem, they said, was metadata. In the music world, metadata most commonly refers to the song credits you see on services like Spotify or Apple Music, but it also includes all the underlying information tied to a released song or album, including titles, songwriter and producer names, the publisher(s), the record label, and more. That information needs to be synchronized across all kinds of industry databases to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid. And often, they aren’t.

Books, Writing, and Language

How we discovered three poisonous books in our university library

Education

Trump administration cancels English classes, soccer, legal aid for unaccompanied child migrants in U.S. shelter

Food and Drink

Lemon Cheesecake A gingersnap crust, lemon zest in the batter, and lemon curd topping.
Honey-Mustrad dressing Honey, lemon juice, oil, two kinds of mustard, red-wine vinegar, black pepper and salt.

History and Archaeology

An Incredible Fossil Contains a Whole School of 259 Fish

In 2016, Nobuaki Mizumoto was visiting the dinosaur museum in his hometown of Katsuyama, Japan, when he came across an unexpected display—not of a dinosaur, but of a school of fish. It was embedded in limestone shale and exhibited in a corner with no particular fanfare. Yet the 50-million-year-old fossil was clearly extraordinary: 259 tiny fish bodies with eyes and spines and even fins. All but a few faced the same direction, as if frozen mid-swim.

The Day the Dinosaurs Died “DePalma’s thesis adviser estimated that the site will keep specialists busy for half a century. “Robert’s got so much stuff that’s unheard of,” he said. “It will be in the textbooks.”

Science and Nature

New layers of water ice have been found beneath Mars’ North Pole

These layers were found to be 90% water in some places, and are believed to be the remnants of ancient polar ice sheets. If melted, the researchers indicate that they would create a global ocean with a depth of at least 1.5 meters (5 feet).

The Trump admin really, really doesn’t want you to see this climate science

The same scientific agencies that rocketed Neil Armstrong to the moon and forecast the landfall of hurricanes that pummel the U.S. coast also expect dramatic changes to Earth’s climate this century, should humanity continue to heat the planet.
But the Trump administration no longer wants many federal scientists to consider longer-term consequences of saturating the atmosphere with the potent heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide, now likely at its highest level in millions of years.

Society

Notes arguing over flower ownership are the most British thing ever
How to remove your private info from the web in an afternoon
After Leaving Thousands in Agony, the CDC Is Finally Clarifying Its Painkiller Restrictions

The guideline urged doctors to be cautious about prescribing opioid doses higher than 90 morphine equivalents (a way to compare opioids of different strengths) and to generally avoid prescribing any opioids for chronic pain, if at all possible. Introduced in a country facing the worst overdose crisis in history, it was not surprising that what was intended as a set of recommendations rapidly hardened into legal and insurance strictures.

The State Department will start asking visa applicants for their social media accounts

Technology

Facebook’s engagement is sinking with no end in sight
Inside the Apple Team That Decides Which Apps Get on iPhones Phillip Shoemaker, the former head of App Store reviews discusses why apps get rejected, competition between Apple and developers, and planning for WWDC. See also Phillip Shoemaker’s Medium article: Apple v. Everybody

On one hand, Apple owns the App Store and should be able to handle the apps on that store however they see fit. On the other hand, there is only one way to install apps onto an iPhone, and that’s through the App Store. With that kind of power, I think it behooves Apple to start thinking about fair competition, especially in the light of regulator scrutiny:

For my part, I think Apple needs to be better about revenue sharing with artists and developers; developers selling though the App store pay Apple a 30% cut to Apple. Why not have a scalable percentage tied to units sold, starting at 10%, and capping at 15%? A standard royalty fee for an agent who sells a book to a publisher is 15%. Apple is not adding value to the product, just to the purchsing experience, and doesn’t have the issues book stores have with returning a printed book (which is why book stores have a substantial lower price for purchasing books from publishers to re-sell).

Women’s Work

Via History News Network: “Candace Wellman is the author of two recent books published by Washington State University:  Peace Weavers, Uniting the Salish Coast through Cross-cultural Marriages (2017) and Interwoven Lives, Indigenous Mothers of Salish Coast Communities (March, 2019). Their eight biographies are the product of 21 years of research and writing. She is also a public speaker and consultant on the subject. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.”Where Did the Indigenous Community Mothers Go?

Historians did not consider that elite Native women’s families might have had their own agenda when they married their daughters to men they considered to be of equal status. Indigenous community mothers seem to have been an uncomfortable truth for historians and other writers that did not fit with the Euro-American mythology they sought to build around “the first white woman” in town. The result was their now-conspicuous absence.

💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰

Judge bars Trump from building border wall sections with emergency funds

“The position that when Congress declines the executive’s request to appropriate funds, the executive nonetheless may simply find a way to spend those funds ‘without Congress’ does not square with fundamental separation of powers principles dating back to the earliest days of our Republic,” the judge wrote in granting a temporary injunction to stop construction.

A Single Scandal Sums Up All of Trump’s Failures

. . . new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

Why Trump Is Rolling Back LGBTQ Health-Care Protections

On Friday, Donald Trump’s administration started rolling back two controversial legal provisions related to the Affordable Care Act: protections against discrimination based on gender identity, and based on the termination of a pregnancy. Advocates for LGBTQ and women’s health care see this proposed reversal as a pointed attack on transgender people and patients who have received abortions—the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration to limit the rights of marginalized populations.

Trump administration bans CDC from saying “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” and more

The Trump administration has banned seven words from the Centers for Disease Control’s upcoming budget documents, the Washington Post reports. The words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

Trump Is Making The Same Trade Mistake That Started The Great Depression

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

H/T Lisa C: Remembering the US soldiers who refused orders to murder Native Americans at Sand Creek
Viral ‘Egg Boy’ announces he’s donated his GoFundMe money to charity
Notes arguing over flower ownership are the most British thing ever And also I met the author of the viral ‘don’t pick my flowers’ note
1st class to grow up with Kzoo Promise: ‘Its unreal’< See The Kalamazoo Promise/p>



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