Engaging Ideas – 10/6/2017
Reply
the legacy of Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School
Many years ago, I met Vincent and Elinor Ostrom in the seminar room of what is now the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University in Bloomington. I then had several personal interactions with Lin Ostrom, and I’ve been back a few times to Bloomington. (I even wrote a poem about a B&B there once.) I have taught and studied her work and am writing a book in which the tradition that she and Vincent founded–the Bloomington School–is one of three essential components of a theory of citizenship. (The other two are the post-War Frankfurt School and the tradition of political nonviolence: Gandhi/King.) She is, for me, the model scholar.
Today, I was able to speak about Lin Ostrom’s legacy in that same seminar room. I tried to place the Bloomington School in the context of major currents of political theory and civic renewal. A video of my talk is already up on the Workshop’s website. The title is “Elinor Ostrom and the Citizen’s Basic Question: What Should We Do?”
See also: Elinor Ostrom wins the Nobel!, Elinor Ostrom speaking at Tufts, Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012, Ostrom, Habermas, and Gandhi are all we need, and Habermas, Ostrom, Gandhi (II),
Title VII
Yesterday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a memo to agency heads and US attorneys. Obtained by BuzzFeed, the memo read in part:
Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination encompasses discrimination between men and women but does not encompass discrimination based on gender identity per se, including transgender status.
In other words, while federal law previously recognized that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to all forms of gender discrimination, the Justice Department is now choosing to interpret the law more narrowly; no longer protecting all men and women from employer, voting, or other forms of public discrimination. Specifically, transgender men and women will no longer have these federal protections.
Currently, only 20 states plus the District of Columbia have laws prohibiting discrimination against transgender individuals. So with the distribution of a memo, three fifths of our nation’s citizens just lost human rights protections which they had the day before.
It shouldn’t be that easy to take away basic rights.
Additionally, the removal of federal backing puts existing state laws into greater peril, as opponents are already mobilized trying to over turn state laws. Even more of our citizens could lose their rights.
This unconscionable act cannot go unchallenged.
In his memo, Session tries to sound nonchalant about stripping citizens of their rights. The new Justice Department interpretation is “a conclusion of law, not policy. As a law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice must interpret Title VII as written by Congress.”
Scapegoating Congress for this egregious interpretation, however, flies in the face of existing case law and existing understanding Title VII protections.
Sessions attempts to appear all innocent and neutral in re-interpreting this law:
The Justice Department must and will continue to affirm the dignity of all people, including transgender individuals. Nothing in this memorandum should be construed to condone mistreatment on the basis of gender identity, or to express a policy view on whether Congress should amend Title VII to provide different or additional protections.
But it’s not neutral to roll back protections which have been in place, and it’s not innocent to explicitly remove protections covering transgender individuals. Despite his claims to the contrary, this is a policy move, not a legal one.
Furthermore this move comes just days after the United States took a position – as just one of 13 countries – against a UN resolution condemning the death penalty as a sanction for same-sex relations.
Yes, you read that right – we are no longer against the state-sanction murder of people for being gay.
The current administration is waging a war against human rights on many fronts. I know we are tired, we are exhausted and numbed from the constant stream of negative news. But we cannot allow these policy changes to pass silently or without confrontation.
We cannot let it be okay to simply re-interpret someone’s rights away.
Public Debate
Method: Public Debate
Oct 5 '17
The Public Debate originated in France but has since become a common method of public engagement and multi-stakeholder consultation required by some governments on large public works proposals.
Public Debate
Method: Public Debate
Oct 5 '17
The Public Debate originated in France but has since become a common method of public engagement and multi-stakeholder consultation required by some governments on large public works proposals.
Automated Methods for Identifying Civilians Killed by Police
I recently read Keith et al’s excellent paper, Identifying civilians killed by police with distantly supervised entity-event extraction, which was presented this year at the conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, or, as it’s more commonly known, EMNLP.
The authors present an initial framework for tackling an important real world question: how can you automatically extract from a news corpus the names of civilians killed by police officers? Their study focuses on the U.S. context, where there are no complete federal records of such killings.
Filling this gap, human rights organizations and journalists have attempted to compile such a list through the arduous – and emotionally draining – task of reading millions of news articles to identify victim names and event details.
Given the salience of this problem, a Keith et al set out to develop a more streamlined solution.
The event-extraction problem is furthermore an interesting NLP challenge in itself – there are non-trivial disambiguation problems as well as semantic variability around indicators of civilians killed by police. Common false positives in their automated approaches, for example, include officers killed in the line of duty and non-fatal encounters.
Their approach relies on distant supervision – using existing databases of civilians killed as mention-level labels. They implement this labeling with both “hard” and a “soft” assumption models. The hard labeling assumes that every mention of a person (name and location) from the gold-standard database corresponds to a mention of a police killing. This assumption proves to be too hard and an inaccurate model of the textual input.
The “soft” models perform better. Rather than assume that every relevant sentence corresponds to a mention of a police killing, soft models assume that at least one of the sentences do. That is, if you take all the sentence in the corpus which mention an individual known to have been killed by police, at least one of those sentences directly conveys information of the killing.
Intuitively, this makes sense – while the hard assumption takes every mention of Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, or Philandro Castile to occur in a sentence mentioning a police killing, we know from simply reading the news that some of those sentence will talk about their lives, their families, or the larger context in which their killing took place.
For both assumptions, Keith et al compare performance between a convolutional neural net and a linear regression model – ultimately finding that the regression, with the soft assumption, out performs the neural net.
There’s plenty of room for improvement and future work on their model, but overall, this paper presents a clever NLP application to a critical, real world problem. It’s a great example of the broad and important impact NLP approaches can have.
Social Ontology 2018: The 11th Biennial Collective Intentionality Conference
On August 22-25, 2018, Tufts University will host the biennial Collective Intentionality conference, with the Tisch College of Civic Life as a co-sponsor. This interdisciplinary and international conference will bring together people who study the nature of the social world and how to improve our models of it.
|
|
More information about the organizers, how to submit abstracts, and even an essay prize are all here.
White Space
This weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a rich discussion hosted by The Welcome Project with local author Jennifer De Leon. The conversation focused on De Leon’s 2013 short story The White Space.
While helping her father put together his first résumé, the U.S.-born De Leon writes:
Without cell phone or fax numbers, email or website addresses, the top of the page looks lonely. Where do I write that my father grew up along the southern coast of Guatemala, where his father worked for the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company (UFC), which helped kick Communism to the world curb while pretending to care about Guatemalan citizens’ intake of bananas? They were only interested in profits and maintaining a capitalist economy.
…On my own résumés over the last ten years, phrases like terminal degree, academic honors, and double major are arranged nearly under the canopy of this section. But I can’t use any of these terms here. My father was denied the opportunity to complete secondary school in Guatemala because he needed to help support his brothers and sisters. Instead he plucked feathers off dead chickens in a small factory in Guatemala City from the time he was 14 years old.
…So tonight, as I help my father write his first résumé, I struggle to find words to fill this white space.
There is much in De Leon’s story which would resonate with any adult child: that feeling that you don’t really know your parents the way you might know a friend; that there is something intangibly distant about their experiences; that they lived in and were shaped by a world which ceased to exist before you were born; that the rich texture of their experience will always be beyond your grasp.
There is much in her story which would resonate with any first-generation to college student: feeling that vast void which palpably disconnects generational experience; realizing the values and norms you so blithely take for granted can seem foreign and obscure; coming to the inescapable conclusion that those same norms glibly dismiss the experiences of people whom you know to have real value.
And, as De Leon and others discussed this weekend, there is much in her story which resonates broadly with children of immigrants: feeling the generational and cultural divide even more sharply; feeling ashamed at your lack of fluency in your parent’s language; feeling like you’re torn between selves, between worlds, between identities.
Feeling like nothing you can do will ever make up for the sacrifice your parents made on your behalf.
In reflecting on these all these interwoven, sweet and painful complications, De Leon concluded:
“Like most beautiful things in life, it’s not so simple. I just do my best.”
NICD Explores Civility on Listen to America Tour
In case you haven’t heard, the ‘Listen to America’ tour kicked off last month and has been traveling from city to city to hold conversations with folks on their hopes, fears, and what it means to be American. The listening tour, a project by Huffpost and NCDD member org the National Institute for Civil Discourse, is seeking the voices often unheard and to facilitate conversations around civility while building the capacity to listen with each other. Read the full schedule to find out where the tour has gone so far and below you can read where the upcoming stops are going to be.
Below is an excerpt from the article written by long time NCDD member Carolyn Lukensmeyer of NICD and you can find the full original version at Huffpost’s site here.
Seeking Civility: The ‘Listen To America’ Tour
This week, HuffPost journalists embark on something normally reserved for politicians and presidential candidates. Over the course of the 25-city “Listen to America” tour, journalists at HuffPost will seek out voices from individuals and families of all ages and backgrounds to share their hopes, dreams and fears.
Listening tours provide an opportunity for political candidates to reach out and connect with everyday Americans and clear an important leadership hurdle: the ability to show that they care about people.
It’s not every day journalists adopt a tactic used by political candidates. But in our tumultuous times, empathy appears to be a skill that is lacking across society. As Americans continue to grow further apart, they seem to have stopped listening and resorted to shouting down people who might disagree with them.
Americans may not agree on very much these days, but we can recognize the divisions in front of us. A Pew Research Center poll from January found that 86 percent of Americans believe we’re more divided today than in the past. It’s only through listening, understanding, and respecting one another can we start to bridge this divide.
You can read the full article on Huffpost’s site here.
Upcoming Tour Schedule
Oct. 3 – Detroit + Dearborn
Oct. 4 + 5 – Fort Wayne, Ind.
Oct. 6 – Milwaukee, Wis.
Oct. 9 – Des Moines
Oct. 10 – Kansas City
Oct. 11 – Lincoln, Neb.
Oct. 13 – Casper, Wyo.
Oct. 16 – Livingston, Mont.
Oct. 18 – Provo, Utah
Oct. 20 – Tucson, Ariz.
Oct. 23 – Albuquerque, N.M.
Oct. 25 – Odessa, Texas
Oct. 27 – Houston
Oct. 29 + 30 – New Orleans
You can find the full original version of this article by Carolyn Lukensmeyer of NICD on Huffpost’s site at www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/seeking-civility-the-listen-to-america-tour_us_59b7213ee4b0883782dec284?