Christien Klaufus writes at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research blog on burial places of large metropolises in Latin America:
What have we learned from the examples of burial place policy in Latin American metropolises? Poorly regulated logistics for burial plot allocation can result not only in emotional suffering, but also in public health risks. Many large burial places in cities all over the world were built in response to a disaster or epidemic. In some cases, these then became the cause of more deaths. By carefully monitoring the existing capacity, combined with tight logistics and behavioural regulations, we can prevent burial places from becoming another risk factor during the crisis.
The trolley problem though experiment of ethics in coronavirus times:
You can divert the runaway trolley, but doing so would disrupt the trolley service causing the company to lose profits. pic.twitter.com/1jyJCPZr6y
— Ethics in Bricks (@EthicsInBricks) March 25, 2020
“Outtakes” from interviews by David Hoffman on the streets of New York in the late 70s when he was doing a documentary on the coming of the information age.
Christopher Nehring at Deutsche Welle writes about the surge in conspiracy theories and rumours that circulate during pandemics such as the current coronavirus:
These, and other conspiracy theories, however, rely on arguments that are never weighted in evidence. The conspiracies tend to emerge in the early stages of a pandemic — when little is known about a pathogen’s origin and spread.
From the A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (Eric Hughes, 1993):
“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. … We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy … We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. … Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and … we’re going to write it.”
Self-described cypherpunk Harry Halpin talks with Coindesk about his company’s (Nym Technologies) vision for privacy solutions at the network level a world where privacy is gradually being eroded. His vision of why we need privacy in order to be able to change the world is inspiring.
In an article by Standpoint Magazine Joseph Rachman uses insights from author Umberto Eco to understand the rise of new far right movements. I found the following quote interesting because it describes how the far right now also uses the “Semiological Guerrilla Warfare” tactics that Eco proposed.
Een interessant essay van Eva Meijer, postdoctoraal onderzoeker aan de Universiteit Wageningen over de huidige coronavirus pandemie. In haar eesay schrijft ze over hoe deze biologische processen verworven zijn met hoe we sociaal en politiek om gaan met dit virus.
Helen Lewis writes at The Atlantic magazine about how “Pandemics affect men and women differently”.
The coronavirus crisis will be global and long-lasting, economic as well as medical. However, it also offers an opportunity. This could be the first outbreak where gender and sex differences are recorded, and taken into account by researchers and policy makers. For too long, politicians have assumed that child care and elderly care can be “soaked up” by private citizens—mostly women—effectively providing a huge subsidy to the paid economy. This pandemic should remind us of the true scale of that distortion.
A quote from the Freakonomics podcast “How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War”:
[Peter Timmer]: I used to ask my class, I’m talking 1985, “Where is the world’s largest supercomputer?” And the correct answer was, “It’s at the Pentagon.” Okay. “Where is the world’s second largest supercomputer?” Bentonville, Ark. Home of Walmart. They used that computer to track every single item on every single Walmart shelf. That information technology is what revolutionized food marketing. And it was pretty much invented by Walmart.