Category: rePosts

Uncloaking a Slumlord Conspiracy with Social Network Analysis
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
A client of ours — a small, not-for-profit, economic justice organization [EJO] — used social network analysis [SNA] to assist their city attorney in convicting a group of “slumlords” of various housing violations that the real estate investors had been side-stepping for years. The housing violations, in multiple buildings, included:
raw sewage leaks
multiple tenant children with high lead levels
eviction of complaining tenants
utility liens of six figures
The EJO had been working with local tenants in run-down properties and soon started to notice some patterns. The EJO began to collect public data on the properties with the most violations. As the collected data grew in size, the EJO examined various ways they could visualize the data making it clear and understandable to all concerned. They tried various mind-mapping and organization-charting software but to no avail — the complex ties they were discovering just made the diagrams hopelessly unreadable. They turned to social network analysis [SNA] to make sense of the complex interconnectivity.
The data I will present below is not the actual data from the criminal case. However, it does accurately reflect the social network analysis they performed. The names and genders of the individuals, as well as the names of real estate holdings [LLC] and other businesses have all been masked. This case will be presented in the sequence the EJO followed, first they looked at the real estate holdings, then the owners of the holdings, and then their connections, which led to other connections, and more people and entities.
via Revealing Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Conspiracy.

The people who feel this way have always been a minority of the readership, a fact obscured by print bundles, but made painfully visible by paywalls. When a paper abandons the standard paywall strategy, it gives up on selling news as a simple transaction. Instead, it must also appeal to its readers’ non-financial and non-transactional motivations: loyalty, gratitude, dedication to the mission, a sense of identification with the paper, an urge to preserve it as an institution rather than a business.
via Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users « Clay Shirky.

It mostly comes down to a handful of medical specialities that have grown much faster than expected. Some parts of the Medicare system have actually grown slower than expected. All of them, however, would face a double-digit cut in reimbursements if Congress doesn’t appropriate any additional money to the Medicare program.
Harvard health policy researchers Ali Alhassani, Amitabh Chandra and Michael Chernew draw up the above chart to explore how much various medical specialities either overshot or came in under Medicare spending targets. Radiation oncology, for example, overshot what we expected it to cost by just about 300 percent. General surgery, however, has actually cost much lower than expected while opthalmology is just about on target.
There’s a hole between how much we budget for Medicare and how much it costs, because way more medical specialities are to the right of the dotted line here than to the left.
This graph also speaks to the doc-fix as a relatively inelegant policy solution: If Congress passes a pay-patch, all doctors see their salaries remain steady. If they don’t, all face a 27.4 percent reduction in reimbursement, regardless of whether their costs have actually outpaced the Medicare budget. “Across-the-board cuts in fees are too blunt an instrument to restrain the growth of spending on physician services,” the Harvard researchers argue. In other words, it’s hard to push general surgeons to keep costs down — as this chart shows they have — if, at the end of the day, their only reward will be a double-digit pay cut along with everyone else.
via Why Medicare is expensive, in one chart – The Washington Post.

Walking away from “real”
As in, “that’s not a real football team, they don’t play in Division 1” or “That stock isn’t traded on a real exchange” or “Your degree isn’t from a real school.”
Real contains all sorts of normative assumptions and implicit criticisms for those that don’t qualify. Real is just one way to reject the weird.
My problem with the search for the badge of real is that it trades your goals and your happiness for someone else’s.
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via Seth’s Blog: Walking away from “real”.

“Basketball is the biggest sport that we follow; we don’t know much about American sports apart from that,” Makati contractor Jerry Araneta said. “I only know of O.J. Simpson, for obvious reasons. Oh, and Brett Favre. There is a poster of him in my favorite bar. But not Tim Tebow, I don’t know him.”
That may change soon, especially if Tebow’s fame and form continue to surge. Two Manila newspapers are planning stories on the quarterback this week, and Filipino state television is sending a crew to the Broncos’ showdown against the New England Patriots on Sunday.
Tebow continues his family’s mission work, and his foundation has combined with renowned charity CURE International to build a state-of-the-art hospital in the troubled region of Davao that will provide reconstructive surgery for children suffering from deformities.
Funding for the $3.1 million project is nearly 80 percent complete, and it is expected that Tebow will be present at the groundbreaking ceremony in January.
Unless, of course, the weekly escape acts continue into the post-season.
via Tebow Was Here? Superstar Still Unknown In Philippines City Of His Birth | ThePostGame.

A common observation, about both the Internet dating world and the world at large, is that there is an apparent surplus of available women, especially in their thirties and beyond, and a shortage of recommendable men. The explanation for this asymmetry, which isn’t exactly news, is that men can and usually do pursue younger women, and that often the men who are single are exactly the ones who prefer them. For women surveying a landscape of banished husbands or perpetual boys, the biological rationale offers little solace. Neither does the Internet.
via Online Dating: Sex, Love, and Loneliness : The New Yorker.

We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle—economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation. I’ve been a big believer in historical pendulum swings—American sociopolitical cycles that tend to last, according to historians, about 30 years. So maybe we are coming to the end of this cultural era of the Same Old Same Old. As the baby-boomers who brought about this ice age finally shuffle off, maybe America and the rich world are on the verge of a cascade of the wildly new and insanely great. Or maybe, I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper.
via Kurt Andersen: From Fashion to Housewares, Are We in a Decades-Long Design Rut? | Style | Vanity Fair.