Open source, procurement, and gov tech.
Let’s say your cousin needs a kidney. You agree to provide one. But you’re not a match. No problem: an organ registry finds somebody who is a match for you, and somebody who’s already agreed to provide a kidney to that person is a match for your cousin. So you swap kidneys, and both people …
Continue reading “Sixty people coordinated the largest-ever organ exchange.”
The Posse Foundation is premised on the notion that if dropout-prone high school students can enroll in college with a posse—a peer group they bring with them that all support one another—that they’re more likely to succeed. It’s been running for twenty years now, grouping 600 students into groups of 10 students, and enrolling them …
15% of U.S. marriages in 2010 were between people of different races or ethnicities, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. 43% of Americans think that the rise of interracial marriage is a societal good, and only 11% think it’s bad. Over a third of Americans have a close relative who is …
Continue reading “Pew quantifies the rise of interracial marriage.”
Good for the New York Times’ Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman for this passage in a story about the leaked Heartland Institute documents detailed their plans to discredit science teachers: “Heartland’s latest idea, the documents say, is a plan to create a curriculum for public schools intended to cast doubt on mainstream climate science and …
Continue reading “The New York Times points out an untruth.”
Yes indeed, it’s happening. Goode is running on the Constitution Party ticket, as has been suspected for the past year. His campaign treasurer is, as always, his wife. The question is whether he’ll crack 0.5% of the vote. My suspicion is that, no, he won’t. →
I’ve never been thrilled with the Dow as an indicator of the health of the economy (just thirty companies are factored in, using some pretty crude calculations), but Adam Nash has done the math on one facet of why it’s lousy. Famously, in 2009, Dow Jones dropped GM, and added Cisco to the DJIA instead …
Continue reading “Apple, Cisco, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.”
“Life is autonomous self-reproduction with variations.” A vibrant debate follows this assertion. →
It’s been an open question whether one of the things separating Neanderthals from us is that we created art, and they did not. Now cave paintings have been found in Spain, and charcoal found by the paintings has been carbon dated to around 43,000 years ago. Neanderthals are thought to have been the sole humanoids …
Continue reading “Possible Neanderthal cave paintings have been discovered.”
I don’t normally mention my public speaking engagements, but tomorrow I’ve got one that’s free, open to the public, and liable to be of general interest. Tomorrow is the Democratic Party of Virginia’s Jefferson Jackson Dinner, the party’s big annual event. As a part of the day’s activities, I’m speaking on a panel with former …
Continue reading “I’m speaking at tomorrow’s Jefferson Jackson event in Richmond.”
I’m impressed by Drugcite, a non-governmental website that presents data on prescription drugs using open data sources, displaying it in a simple, easy-to-understand fashion. Today I really needed to research Coumadin, and Drugcite provided one-stop-shopping for that. It’s an open data site in the style of Richmond Sunlight, but rather than focusing on government (as …
Continue reading “A private open data reference for medications.”