The Society of Professional Journalists is sponsoring an essay contest for high school students on the topic, "During a presidential election cycle, how can local journalism help foster more civil discussion in communities around politics and democracy?" Deadline for submissions is Feb. 21. Top prize is $1,000. www.spj.org/a-hs.asp
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Albania recently suffered its strongest earthquake in 40 years, but Albania is no stranger to earthquakes: the country sits at the edge of the Adriatic tectonic plate. This seismic hazard map of Albania from the World Health Organization shows regions within the country most prone to earthquakes and marks the epicenters of previous earthquakes. data.euro.who.int/e-atlas/europe/images/map/albania/alb-seismic.pdf
For those interested in learning more about Chinese president Xi Jinping, this article from Foreign Policy reviews Inside the Mind of Xi Jingping: "Xi Jinping is a Chinese renaissance man. Self-assured, self-possessed, and utterly unflappable, Xi is equally at home on the hearths of struggling farmers and in the greeting halls of foreign capitals. State media likes to juxtapose the years he spent in the caves of Shaanxi with the days he spent governing Shanghai’s glittering towers. Here is a man as men should be: a leader who can grasp both the plow and the bond market! ... But what of the person behind the persona? Unearthing that man is the goal of François Bougon’s book Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping, translated from the original French into English in 2018." foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/21/xi-jinping-china-communist-party-francois-bougon
A recent report released by the U.S. Census Bureau shows Americans are moving at the lowest rate since the government started collecting data in 1947. Fewer than 10% of Americans moved last year, about half what it was in the 1950s, for example. Housing prices, low wages, student loans, and an aging population are all contributing, but economists and demographers are still trying to puzzle out exactly why Americans -- young, old, wealthy, poor, well educated, and not-so-well educated -- have stopped moving and if this is a good thing or a bad thing. www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/american-workers-moving-states-.html
Retirement is expensive! This map looks at the the cost for one person to retire comfortably in each of the 50 states, based on cost of living and life expectancy. howmuch.net/articles/cost-comfortable-retirement-america
Do humans need to be morally re-engineered? This article from Philosophy Now (UK) makes an interesting argument.
"For the vast majority of our 150,000 years or so on the planet, we lived in small, close-knit groups, working hard with primitive tools to scratch sufficient food and shelter from the land. Sometimes we competed with other small groups for limited resources. Thanks to evolution, we are supremely well adapted to that world, not only physically, but psychologically, socially and through our moral dispositions. But this is no longer the world in which we live. The rapid advances of science and technology have radically altered our circumstances over just a few centuries. The population has increased a thousand times since the agricultural revolution eight thousand years ago. Human societies consist of millions of people. Where our ancestors’ tools shaped the few acres on which they lived, the technologies we use today have effects across the world, and across time, with the hangovers of climate change and nuclear disaster stretching far into the future. The pace of scientific change is exponential. But has our moral psychology kept up? ... "A basic fact about the human condition is that it is easier for us to harm each other than to benefit each other. It is easier for us to kill than it is for us to save a life; easier to injure than to cure. Scientific developments have enhanced our capacity to benefit, but they have enhanced our ability to harm still further. As a result, our power to harm is overwhelming. We are capable of forever putting an end to all higher life on this planet. Our success in learning to manipulate the world around us has left us facing two major threats: climate change – along with the attendant problems caused by increasingly scarce natural resources – and war, using immensely powerful weapons. What is to be done to counter these threats? ... "Our moral shortcomings are preventing our political institutions from acting effectively. Enhancing our moral motivation would enable us to act better for distant people, future generations, and non-human animals. One method to achieve this enhancement is already practised in all societies: moral education. ... But there is another possibility emerging. Our knowledge of human biology – in particular of genetics and neurobiology – is beginning to enable us to directly affect the biological or physiological bases of human motivation, either through drugs, or through genetic selection or engineering, or by using external devices that affect the brain or the learning process. We could use these techniques to overcome the moral and psychological shortcomings that imperil the human species." philosophynow.org/issues/91/Moral_Enhancement |
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