Six Degrees of Wonder Woman: Part 1

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Over the course of the semester, I’ll be studying a network of my choosing for my Complex Networks class. So, of course, I’m studying superheroes.

I pulled data from the Grand Comics Database, which really is pretty grand. Their database covers all printed comics throughout the world and includes:

8,738 publishers
5,814 brands
4,611 indicia publishers
88,408 series
1,188,029 issues
46,814 variant issues
226,893 issue indexes
549,708 covers
1,521,152 stories

I’m filtering down all that data to look as a specific subset I’m interested in: female characters in comic books.

This is a non-trivial task since the database does not include gender information. But, once I finish cleaning and processing the data, it looks like I’ll be left with about 10K female characters who appear in about 65K issues. There’s about 100K links connecting the two sets of nodes, with a link connecting a character to each issue they appear in.

From this, I’ll be able to look at the network of female superheroes and explore questions of female representation in comic books. So…get excited.

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Eco-hacking a Fossil-Free, Collaborative Future

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At the upcoming COP Summit in Paris (the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), no one expects the world’s governments to make serious headway against global climate change. Neoliberal-obsessed governments are more concerned with propping up collapsing capitalist structures than in reducing carbon emissions (which have doubled over the past generation).  Corporations are more intent on preserving their market share and investors in preserving their net worth than in entertaining an environmentally benign economic paradigm shift.  We can be sure, following COP21, however, that world leaders will declare the event a success and let loose their own copious emissions of PR blather.

Let’s face it – we’re more or less on our own.  The impetus for change has to come from the bottom and the local. 

Which brings me to the inspirational work of POC21 – Proof of Concept 21 – which stands for “a proof of concept that the future we need can be built with our own hands.” For five weeks – August 15 to September 20 – more than 100 makers, designers, engineers, scientists and geeks converged on Château de Millemont, an ancient castle near Paris.  Their mission:  to work together in developing prototype machines that could radically reduce our dependence on carbon fuels.

The idea of POC21 is to invent inexpensive, modular household devices, farm tools, energy systems and other appropriate technologies that can be replicated cheaply, repaired easily and copied and shared by anyone. “Imagine a new breed of open source products available in your neighborhood,” POC organizers have announced. “This is our vision.”

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measures of Critical Consciousness

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New on the CIRCLE website is a guest post on Critical Consciousness Impact Measures. As the authors (Matthew Diemer, Ellen Hawley McWhirter, Emily J. Ozer, and Luke Rapa) explain, Critical Consciousness “refers to marginalized or oppressed people’s critical reflection on oppressive social, economic, or political conditions, the motivation to address perceived injustice, and action taken to counter injustice.” In their work–together and separately–these scholars have found that students do better when they have more Critical Consciousness. Survey measures are embedded in the post and are available for anyone to use in program evaluations or research, or even just for discussion.

Global Research Partnership Awarded Significant Grant to Support Participedia

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Oct 1 '15

Global Research Partnership Awarded Significant Grant to Support Participedia

We are in the midst of a transformation of democracy—one possibly as revolutionary as the development of the representative, party-based form of democracy that evolved out of the universal franchise. This transformation involves hundreds of thousands of new channels of citizen involvement in government, often outside the more visible politics of electoral representation, and occurring in most countries of the world. 

Global Research Partnership Awarded Significant Grant to Support Participedia

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Oct 1 '15

Global Research Partnership Awarded Significant Grant to Support Participedia

We are in the midst of a transformation of democracy—one possibly as revolutionary as the development of the representative, party-based form of democracy that evolved out of the universal franchise. This transformation involves hundreds of thousands of new channels of citizen involvement in government, often outside the more visible politics of electoral representation, and occurring in most countries of the world. 

Searching for Wise Questions

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The article, Searching for Wise Questions, by Laura Chasin was published September 2011 and discusses how the way questions are framed can dramatically shape the answer. Written with the September 11, 2001 attacks in mind, the article offers opportunities to frame questions in a way that heal rather than divide.

Below is an excerpt from the article and the full piece can be found on Public Conversations Project’s website here.

From the article…

My experience conducting dialogues among those who have fierce differences about issues such as abortion and homosexuality has made me aware that questions have impact even before they are answered. They can close a door or turn on a light. They can intensify conflict or deepen mutual understanding. Asking the right questions now could build bridges across old divides and prevent the digging of new trenches at a time when we can ill afford further damage to our national landscape.

Questions have unsung power. They focus our attention: “What was your first reaction?” They call upon one dimension of us rather than another: “How are you trying to reassure your children?” They can point us toward a path of understanding and action: “Are there legitimate reasons for people to hate this country?”

Every question harbors an assumption that is often hidden. “How can we get even?” states more than it asks. By answering a question, most of us unwittingly support its hidden assumptions.

Since the terrible destruction of September 11, we have been barraged by questions of all kinds. Questions that seek facts or reassurance. Dread-filled questions that shuffle, half formed, through the dark hallways of our minds: “Why?” and “What will become of us now?”

What are the right questions for these harrowing times? To me, they are questions that promote recovery, minimize risks, and strengthen us for the marathon that lies ahead. They are questions that can galvanize our loyalty to our precious, if flawed, nation — without accelerating a worldwide spiral of violence that becomes even more catastrophic than the events of September 11.

…

We can notice the impact on ourselves and others of the questions we hear or read. We can be thoughtful about the purposes of the questions we ask. We can avoid using rhetorical questions. We can decline to answer questions likely to steer talk in destructive directions.

About Public Conversations Project
PCP_logoPCP fosters constructive conversation where there is conflict driven by differences in identity, beliefs, and values. We work locally, nationally, and globally to provide dialogue facilitation, training, consultation, and coaching. We help groups reduce stereotyping and polarization while deepening trust and collaboration and strengthening communities. At the core of many of today’s most complex social problems is a breakdown in relationships that leads to mistrust, gridlock, and fractured communities. Public Conversations’ method addresses the heart of this breakdown: we work to shift relationships, building the communication skills and trust needed to make action possible and collaboration sustainable. Since our founding in 1989, Public Conversations’ practitioners have worked on a broad range of issues, including same-sex marriage, immigration, abortion, diversity, guns, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We have also contributed to peace-building efforts in several conflict-torn regions overseas. In situations where a breakdown in trust, relationships, and constructive communication is part of the problem, PCP offers a solution. Follow on Twitter: @pconversations.

Resource Link: www.publicconversations.org/resource/searching-wise-questions

Le Temps des Communes: Biggest Commons Festival Ever

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Le Temps des Communes, surely the largest festival of the commons ever, is about to get underway! The festival is not just a single event in a single place, but a series of more than 250 self-organized events to be held over the course of fifteen days in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada (Quebec) and several Francophone countries in west Africa. 

From October 5 to 18, there will be symposia, workshops, lectures and participatory events on all sorts of commons-related topics.  There will be events to showcase free and open source software, community gardens, participatory mapping projects, seed-sharing, open scientific knowledge, renewable energy co-operatives, land trusts and even a Creative Commons-licensed musical. The hundreds of festival events will help introduce the commons to the general public and demonstrate to current commoners just how large, diverse and exciting the world of collaborative provisioning truly is.

In Lyon, there will be a roundtable about making the city a commons.  In Brussels, there will be an Open Source Festival.  In Brest, a bike tour of shared gardens.  In Paris, nearly thirty different events are planned.

I wish that I could attend the “law and the commons” discussion that will feature Stefano Rodotà, the Italian law scholar, politician and human rights advocate who has pioneered new legal principles for the commons.  Paris will also host “A Day in the Commons” on Île-de-France, with workshop, a meal and planning for the future.

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what happened to leisure time?

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(Hyde Park, NY) I am at FDR’s historic home with (as it happens) a bunch of labor organizers and others concerned with work. On a break, we had a chance to visit the house where the New Deal president was born–we even saw the bed where that blessed event happened–and where he spent most of his life. He was a busy man: Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York, President of the United States for 13 epic years. And yet he also had time to collect one million stamps and more than 20,000 books, many of them about naval history, a special interest of his. He also welcomed many house guests and obviously socialized constantly. He had a dog and was interested in birds.

Where did he find the time for all these hobbies? I know hardly anyone who has enough spare time for the equivalent of stamp collecting, even though they aren’t Commanders in Chief during World War II. Here are three explanation for where the time has gone:

  1. Roosevelt had servants and a wife and a mother who did lots of work within the family. His leisure simply came from privilege. I think this is partly true, but even if he had lived alone without kids, it’s hard to imagine how he could have found the time for hobbies while leading the free world.
  2. He was free of some time-wasters. As it happens, he owned just about the only TV set in the world at the time, the very machine that had been exhibited at the World’s Fair. But there was nothing to watch on it. That actual TV, still preserved in his house, stands as a symbol of time that he couldn’t waste.
  3. He had more free time than we do because he could communicate less. Once he mailed a letter, he just had to wait for a response. In contrast, we get thousands and thousands of emails and texts each year, and they bounce back and forth constantly, many of them reaching whole lists of people who feel the need to keep up with the constant flow. My hypothesis: too much communication is using up our lives. Receiving and sending we waste our powers.

Local and Global Solutions

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I am having great fun taking a Graph Theory class this semester. A graduate level math class, it focuses very much on the theory of graphs, which is remarkably different from the real-world networks I’ve been growing accustomed to.

(And for those of you playing at home, a “graph” and a “network” are basically the same thing, but “graph” is the math/theoretical term and “network” is the science/real-world term.)

In each class, we’re basically asked to prove or disprove properties of a given graph. This is harder than it sounds.

The hardest part, actually, is that I usually think I know the answer. There’s something about the functioning of networks – sorry, graphs – that generally seems intuitively clear. But even if I know the answer, I have no idea how to actually prove it. That’s where the fun comes in.

Now about a month into the semester, I’ve notice an interesting trend in my (flawed) approach to proofs. Asked to explain why a certain property cannot be true, I immediate argue why it couldn’t possibly happen at the local level.

If it’s not a problem at the local level, it ought not to be a problem at the global level.

That’s essentially every argument I’ve made so far.

And it’s not necesarily that I’m wrong about the local level, but – networks are fickle things and a localized approach runs the danger of aggregating into something unintended. That is – you can’t just aggregate the local to make inferences about the global.

Frankly, this is one of the reasons I’m studying network science. Networks are complex, dynamic  models which can so easily be broken down and analyzed. To really understand what’s going on you need to appreciate the local and the global, and think more broadly about how the whole structure interacts.

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Re-imagining Philadelphia’s Community-Police Relations

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Relations between communities and police continues to be one of the most relevant yet difficult dialogue issues of our day, so we wanted to share this recent piece that the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation – an NCDD member organization – recently shared about a police-community dialogue event in Philadelphia on their Challenges to Democracy blog. It provides a look into how these dialogues can begin and the impact they can have on their participants – and their facilitators. Read more below or find the original post here.

Philadelphia Engages Young People in Dialogue on Community-Police Relations

Ash logoIn this post, originally published by MBK Philly, Harvard Graduate School of Design student Courtney D. Sharpe recaps the latest in a series of efforts by My Brother’s Keeper Philadelphia and city agencies to engage youth in a dialogue on community-police relations. The one-day summit, attended by over 200 young people, and subsequent roundtable in City Hall were intended as platforms for youth, especially youth of color, to be able to share their stories and offer suggestions for ways that police and the community can adapt behaviors or policies to work better together. Sharpe is working with My Brother’s Keeper Philadelphia this summer as an Ash Center Summer Fellow. Read more about My Brother’s Keeper Philadelphia, the local affiliate of a national effort launched by President Obama to tackle the opportunity gaps for boys and young men of color. 

This summer began with harrowing tales that exposed latent racism in communities and disproportionate police force used against minority communities across the nation. The tragic AME church massacre and subsequent church fires, the fight to keep flying the confederate flag, and the images of seeing innocent black children chased by police with guns drawn made for an emotional, and inherently politically charged, beginning to the season.

Like many parts of the rest of the country, Philadelphia looked on at these events with horror and sympathy – during this climate of heightened awareness we reflected to create opportunities for interaction among community members to prevent similar travesties from happening in our neighborhoods.

On June 3, My Brother’s Keeper Philadelphia, in partnership with the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, the Police Advisory Commission, and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant and Multicultural Affairs, hosted “Securing Our Future,” a one-day summit on re-imagining Philadelphia’s community-police relations. The event brought together youth from neighborhoods across the city of diverse ethnic backgrounds along with city officials and police officers to have a facilitated dialogue about the youth’s experience with police.

“Securing Our Future” Summit

The goal of the event was to provide a platform for youth, especially youth of color, to be able to share their stories and offer suggestions for ways that police and the community can adapt behaviors or policies to work better together. The event had over 220 youth and youth advocates who were mostly teenagers and young adults but one class of fifth and sixth graders were also present. The conversations were rich and the youth were engaged in the process.

As a Texan, in the wake of the images and video from McKinney, Texas, I felt particularly moved to be involved in the implementation and report back structure of the events developed for youth-police interaction. No one should see on the television neighborhoods that resemble their own, with people who look like them, being attacked for existing in space.

I was fortunate to be able to serve as a facilitator at one of the tables. One of our first questions asked the youth what positive experiences or memories they had with the police; I was struck that at my table they were not able to come up with any.

At that time city officials at the table began to interject with numerous stories of their own, mostly in their professional capacity. I felt that some of them spoke as if to teach or preach and I was grateful that at the break when people chose different tables my group did not have other adults. I was able to ask questions and get the youth to speak to each other. It was raw, honest, and cathartic. One of the girls at the table was a Chinese immigrant and she shared stories of negative police interaction in three states.

As a follow up to the summit, every young person in attendance that was interested was invited to attend a special meeting on June 10 at City Hall in the Mayor’s Reception Room for the presentations of the findings to the Police Department and to participate in a moderated discussion with police officers. Around fifteen youth participated in the roundtable discussion.

At the conclusion of the formal program, Deputy Commissioner Bethel announced his plans to create a youth advisory council and invited all of the youth present to join as they had demonstrated leadership and commitment to being a part of the change process. The formal event was followed by a pizza party in the Council Caucus Room where police officers, City staff and youth continued their conversations joyfully. It was an auspicious beginning to a necessary dialogue.

You can find the original version of this Challenges to Democracy blog post at www.challengestodemocracy.us/home/philadelphia-engages-young-people-in-dialogue-on-community-police-relations/#sthash.F9TlQVGw.dpuf.