[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 1 points 5 hours ago

Lukas Müller, the Würenlos school director, attributes the success of the ban to several factors. For one, the school board agreed way back in 2007 to keep phones out of classrooms. “But it led to students using them incessantly in the breaks or taking bathroom breaks to look at their phones,” remembers Müller, who has been at the school since 2004. “That was just at the start of the iPhone boom.” Studies show that requests to turn off their phones while students are allowed to keep the devices with them during class are rarely successful, and up to 97 percent of students can’t resist the temptation to check their emails or apps. So the board decided the following year to ban phone use in the entire school area. “The students are indeed less distracted,” Müller has observed. And because his K-12 school starts at kindergarten and teaches students all the way through senior year, students get used to being phoneless in school long before they become attached to Instagram or TikTok.


But the solution isn’t as simple as banning all digital devices. The problem isn’t the use of these devices per se, but excessive use and the kind of content students access. Students who spend one to five hours per day on digital devices for learning at school score significantly higher in their mathematics lessons than those who spend no time on such devices, the OECD concludes: “In contrast, students spending over one hour on digital devices for leisure at school score more than nine points lower in mathematics and report a lower sense of belonging at school than students who spend no time on leisure digital activities.”

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submitted 5 hours ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/humanities@beehaw.org
[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 3 points 5 hours ago

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.


Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.

“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.

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submitted 5 hours ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/politics@beehaw.org

Rather than fearing polarization, organizers should seek to understand how they can use it most effectively. This involves recognizing that, while collective action undertaken in pursuit of a good cause typically results in positive outcomes, not all protests have identical effects or produce equal benefits.

Central to harnessing the power of polarization is appreciating that, by its nature, it cuts both ways: the same actions that create positive polarization — drawing more active supporters into movements and convincing previously neutral or undecided observers to at least passively sympathize with the cause — will also have negative effects, turning off some people and firing up the opposition. The goal of movement participants is therefore to make sure that the beneficial results of their actions outweigh the counterproductive ones, and that they are shifting the overall spectrum of support in their favor.

So how, then, can movement participants predict how a given protest will polarize? And how can they work to improve their skills in designing effective actions?

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submitted 5 hours ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/socialism@beehaw.org
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submitted 5 hours ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org

i'm back after an absence; i've been working on a bunch of stuff because Cohost is shutting down at the end of the month.

the result: i have a website now, and i'm porting over my essays and running my union blog out of that. i have an RSS feed that works for both, as far as i can tell. things seem like they're calming down now so hopefully i'll be able to be around more for the remainder of this month

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submitted 1 week ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

Enticing though they are, such arguments conceal a logical flaw. As a classic 19th-century theory known as a Jevons paradox explains, even if autonomous vehicles eventually work perfectly — an enormous “if” — they are likely to increase total emissions and crash deaths, simply because people will use them so much.

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submitted 1 week ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/citylife@beehaw.org
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submitted 1 week ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/humanities@beehaw.org

While in recent years many European businesses have taken steps to alter their previously racist product designs, some games, especially board games like the popular Finnish Afrikan tähti (Star of Africa; Kuvataide, 1951), resist this trend. This raises two questions: First, what are the emotional mechanics which allow openly racist games like Afrikan tähti to remain unchanged and celebrated as ‘classics’ today? Secondly, what can our predominantly white board and role-playing game communities do to let go of emotional attachments to white supremacist games and become invested in a more respectful and welcoming games culture?

[...]we speculate on ways to expedite collective grief to help players reach what we term the ‘white acceptance stage’. We speculate that one useful design intervention to help rethink Afrikan tähti might be to classify it as a PEGI 18 game with the descriptor ‘discrimination’. Seen in this new light, the game might find a new purpose as a cultural educational item complementing lessons on Europe’s colonial past and the self-image of (Northern) Europe for older children. This intervention is inspired by the recent introduction of sensitivity warnings by multinational entertainment corporations such as Disney and broadcasting agencies like YLE (Rytsä, 2007). We argue that adopting such labeling practices for popular board games like Afrikan tähti can be a first step towards confronting racist and colonial ludic heritage.

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submitted 1 week ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/feminism@beehaw.org
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submitted 1 week ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/humanities@beehaw.org

archive.is link

The U.S. has a near-infinite supply of clueless tourists such as myself, much to the dismay of our National Park Service. Yellowstone, our most famous national park thanks to Kevin Costner, welcomes 4.5 million of us each year. Like all of our parks, Yellowstone takes in tourists not only for the revenue but to remind them that the physical country they reside in is a marvel well beyond their comprehension. As such, Yellowstone is set up to accommodate these hordes. And while park officials do their best to keep tourists in line, often literally, my kind still manage to do plenty of tourist shit. We trample plant life. We get shitfaced and pick unwinnable fights with animals ten times our size. And we hurt ourselves. According to NPS data, at least 74 people have died while visiting Yellowstone in the past 15 years. I could have been one of those people. I deserve to be one of those people.

This is why Outside sent me to the park just a few weeks ago, during one of the busiest times of the year. They wanted me to observe our most basic tourists in the wild. Maybe I’d even get to see one die. Or, even better for my editors, maybe I would die while I was there. Maybe I’d look down my nose at the tourists around me only to end up as wolf food myself. Like most other Yellowstone visitors, I was not trained for the outdoors, I relish doing shit that posted signs yell at me not to do, and I often daydream about fighting bears (and winning!). I find danger tempting, which isn’t a good thing given that I can no longer swim a single pool lap without taking a break. Are people like me responsible enough to visit one of our national treasures without breaking it? Do we, as a population, know how to do national parks?

[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 56 points 6 months ago

i literally cannot think of a pricing model i want less for a restaurant i might conceivably patronize than this

[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 87 points 8 months ago

this is clearly not true, Portal literally just got a huge fangame with a Steam release. the issue is entirely that it uses Nintendo stuff and the guy even says as much

[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 59 points 8 months ago

just to add to the plethora of responses: it rather defies belief that he's purely "joking" when, among other things, he's taken photos with anti-trans legislators like Lauren Boebert and let them frame those photos in this manner:

[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 85 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

the weirdest thing to me is these guys always ignore that banning the freaks worked on Reddit--which is stereotypically the most cringe techno-libertarian platform of the lot--without ruining the right to say goofy shit on the platform. they banned a bunch of the reactionary subs and, spoiler, issues with those communities have been much lessened since that happened while still allowing for people to say patently wild, unpopular shit

[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 60 points 8 months ago

techno-libertarianism strikes again! it's every few years with these guys where they have to learn the same lesson over again that letting the worst scum in politics make use of your website will just ensure all the cool people evaporate off your website--and Substack really does not have that many cool people or that good of a reputation to begin with.

[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 74 points 11 months ago

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 57 points 11 months ago

the primary reason Hamas has political power and the political support to attack Israel in this manner is because Israel:

  • treats all Palestinians as second-class citizens and subjects them to a system of political, social, and economic apartheid
  • holds millions of Palestinians in squalid and inhuman conditions, and seizes the territory of millions more in the name of a violent settler project
  • subjects the vast majority of Palestinians to state-sponsored discrimination, terror, indiscriminate bombing, and political violence
  • leaves Palestinians no feasible democratic path to the rights they should have in their current state or the state of Israel, making armed struggle inevitable

you can and should condemn Hamas, but it is inarguable that Israel routinely does worse—overwhelmingly to people just as innocent as the ones Hamas is murdering—which is what makes attacks like this inevitable. you cannot do what Israel does and not expect the outcome to be violence, and it is incumbent on Israel, who holds all the actual power in this dynamic, to break the cycle and stop using every terrorist attack perpetuated against it as an excuse to roll innocent heads.

[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 74 points 11 months ago

a core issue for moving wikis is that Fandom refuses to delete the old wiki so you 1) have to fight an SEO war against them; and 2) have to contend with directing everyone to the right place or else you have two competing wikis (one of which will gradually lapse out of date). it's very irritating.

[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 57 points 1 year ago

i can only presume the remaining 5% is owned by NFTs Georg, who lives on the blockchain and is an outlier who should not have been counted

[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 57 points 1 year ago

this is only your third comment on our site and you are not making a good impression by immediately getting offended by a pretty banal ask.

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alyaza

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