The myths holding back police reform

From Neil Gross, professor of sociology at Colby College and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC:

Myth #1: The police can’t prevent crime

Although I can understand why some people might feel this way—if you live in a neighborhood with persistent crime and what seems like an oppressive police presence, say—research shows that the opposite is true. All else being equal, the larger the number of police officers in an area, the less crime there tends to be, at least for many kinds of crime…

Myth #2: Police reform compromises public safety

for the US as a whole, property crime has been sloping downward more or less uninterrupted since the early 1990s, as measured by official reports to police as well as anonymous victimization surveys.

And now, preliminary data from the largest US cities show a major drop in homicides for the first half of 2023. (Not for all cities. Violent crime in Washington, DC, for example, including homicide, is up this year.)…

Myth #3: Because of policing’s racist origins, there is nothing we can do to improve it

Policing, for its part, has transformed over the decades, as any historian of the subject can attest, and this is also true along the dimension of race. While stubborn racial disparities remain in use of force, arrest rates for petty offenses, routine traffic stops, internal hiring and promotion, and other aspects of police operations—disparities every department should work to minimize—and while horrific evidence of racial animus continues to surface with disturbing frequency, there can be no serious question that policing in 2023 looks very different than it did in, say, Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, when “Bull” Connor, the notoriously racist public safety commissioner, directed his officers and their dogs to viciously attack civil rights protesters because of his opposition to integration.

Very detailed and interesting, with history and real-life examples. 3,600 words: https://time.com/6316258/myths-police-reform/.

And more good news from FutureCrunch (now Fix the News) (bolding is mine):

Europe’s crackdown on air pollution cuts heart disease deaths
Europe recorded the largest annual decline in PM2.5—the air pollution most closely linked to harmful health effects—of any region of the world between 2010 and 2019. As a result, deaths in the region from heart disease attributed to pollution fell by 19.2% and from strokes by 25.3%. This amounts to 88,880 fewer heart disease deaths and 34,317 fewer stroke deaths. FT

Science: How to not spill your coffee

Ever wondered why it’s so hard to walk with a cup of coffee without spilling? It just so happens that the human stride has almost exactly the right frequency to drive the natural oscillations of coffee, when the fluid is in a typically sized coffee mug.

New research shows that the properties of mugs, legs and liquid conspire to cause spills, most often at some point between your seventh and tenth step.

Solutions: (1) walk more slowly; (2) watch the cup instead of your feet; (3) accelerate more slowly; and (4) maybe get a differently-shaped cup.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna47364282

Things to not do in a relationship

From the experts: divorce lawyers. (The headline is The 1 Thing Divorce Lawyers (Almost) Never Do In Their Marriages, but that’s misleading: it’s one thing from each of several lawyers.)

They don’t check their partner’s phone. “If you want a lasting marriage, you need to have trust.”
They don’t make jokes or empty threats about divorce. Yeesh.
They don’t blame their partner. In a healthy dynamic, both partners can recognize their mistakes and each take accountability for their part, rather than wasting time pointing fingers at each other.
They don’t hide their finances. If someone is being cagey or withholding when it comes to money, it doesn’t bode well for the future of the relationship.
They don’t argue over text or email. Digital communication “can easily be misconstrued, especially in tone.”
They don’t say things they can’t take back. “Arguments should come from a solution-oriented place.”
They don’t stop their partner from pursuing their own hobbies and friendships. “Independence enhances a marriage.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/divorce-lawyers-never-do-marriage_l_649c78d0e4b0ea75fd3b35a3.

Checks and cash… buh-bye

Paper checks and cash are being replaced by credit and debit cards and bank/online payments. (The headline is excessive: checks are not dead… yet.)

Back then (2000), 6 out of every 10 noncash purchases, gifts and paid bills were handled with checks. A mere two decades later, just 1 in 20 are. ((My bolding))

Who still uses checks and cash? Older people. Contractors and charities receive more than a third of their receipts as checks. More whites than non-whites (who are less likely to have checking accounts, or to be refused credit). Rural dwellers; people with bachelor’s or advanced degrees.

Details at https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/15/paper-checks-who-uses/ (about 1,300 words). If you don’t have a subscription: https://archive.ph/20230919150831/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/15/paper-checks-who-uses/.

All about Esperanto nouns

You’ve probably heard of the international language Esperanto. About two million people speak it! And you can learn Esperanto around four times faster than other languages! To demonstrate this, here’s how nouns work in Esperanto. Other grammar rules will be similarly simple.

Let’s start with a quick grammar review. Nouns are words for people, places, ideas, and things. For example, dog, ocean, tree, country, goose, sheep are nouns.

In Esperanto, every noun ends with the letter o: dog, ocean, tree, country, goose, sheep become hundo, oceano, arbo, lando, ansero, ŝafo (pronounced “shah-foh”). Period.

In English, we make a noun plural by adding an s to the word: dogs, oceans, trees. Except words ending in y have the y changed to ies (country/countries). Except if the letter before the y is a vowel (boy/boys). Except for goose: the plural is geese. And one sheep two sheep. And there are more exceptions, like words borrowed from other languages.

To make Esperanto nouns plural, you just add a j (pronounced like an English “y”): hundoj, oceanoj, arboj, landoj, anseroj, ŝafoj (pronounced “shah-foy”). Always. No exceptions. End of rules for plurals.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Also, in an English sentence, you know who is doing the action (the subject) and who it is getting done to (the object) from the order of the words:

The dog chases the cat.

The dog is chasing, the cat is getting chased. You know that because the dog is before the verb and the cat is after the verb. (Obviously it gets complicated quickly, but that’s the basic rule.)

An Esperanto sentence shows who the action is getting done to (the object) with an extra ending, the letter n. So these sentences mean exactly the same thing: The dog chases the cat:

La hundo ĉasas la katon.                    The dog chases the cat.
La katon ĉasas la hundo.                    The dog chases the cat.
Ĉasas la hundo la katon.                     The dog chases the cat.
La katon la hundo ĉasas. (Ktp.)         The dog chases the cat. (Etc.)

(Note: hundo is similar to the English word “hound.” ĉ is like English ch, so “chah-sahss.”)

In all of those sentences, we know that the cat is getting chased, because katon ends with the n object ending.

This is useful for people from languages where the word order is different from English, or which also mark the nouns: they can use their usual word order and all Esperantists will understand them. In practice, many Esperantists use the English word order (with the correct endings!) anyway.

But… what happens if your word is both plural and an object? Easy! You just add both the j and the n so the noun ends with –ojn (rhymes with JOIN). The dogs chase the cats:

La hundoj ĉasas la katojn.                  The dogs chase the cats.
La katojn ĉasas la hundoj.                  The dogs chase the cats.
Ĉasas la hundoj la katojn.                  The dogs chase the cats.
La katojn la hundoj ĉasas. (Ktp.)       The dogs chase the cats. (Etc.)

So:

	Singular	Plural
Subject	-O (“oh”)	-OJ (“oy”)
Object	-ON (“own”)	-OJN (“oyn”)

(Note that, in English, the verb has to change from “chases” to “chase” when we have plural dogs. It’s almost like we’re moving the “s” from the verb to the subject! In Esperanto, the verb stays exactly the same.)

And, unlike French, Spanish, German, or Italian (but like English), nouns don’t have a gender. One less thing to memorize for every noun.

That’s nouns in Esperanto. That’s everything. Enjoy!

Hmmm… maybe we can sneak adjectives in here too: words that modify nouns (big, hungry, gray). In English, these do not change for number or use, they’re always the same (one big hungry gray dog or six big hungry gray dogs). In Esperanto, adjectives work just like nouns except using a instead of o for the endings (‑a, ‑an, ‑aj, ‑ajn, pronounced “‑ah”, “‑ahn”, “-eye”, “‑ine”). And they have to match their nouns: La grandaj hundoj ĉasas la grizajn katojn. And you can put them after their nouns, but like English, they’re usually before. La fino (the end)!

An excellent intro to Esperanto grammar is: https://www.youtube.com/@AmericanEsperantist. More info is at www.esperanto-usa.org.

Esperanto—the international language that works.

What’s the best font?

As a font fan (or fanatic), I was pleased to see this article on a major news site.

You make font choices every day. You pick type designs each time you use a word processor, read an e-book, send an email, prepare a presentation, craft a wedding invite and make an Instagram story.

It might seem like just a question of style, but research reveals fonts can dramatically shape what you communicate and how you read.

Fonts are “the clothes that words wear,” said early 20th-century editor Beatrice Warde. They also embody style, emotion and authority. Like a villain’s costume in a movie, they quietly tell part of the story.

And you can display the whole article in any of these fonts:

The article also discusses how readability is affected by serif versus sans-serif, contrast and proportion, x-height etc.

About 1,400 words: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/best-font-you-test-types-styles/?font=modern_serif. If you do not yet have a subscription, this link shows you the non-interactive parts of the article.

(Alas, the answer is, “It depends” — whatever you are most used to is likely to read fastest.)

Cheat codes for life

In computer games, a “cheat code” is a special code or series of steps that gives you extra powers in the game. In real life, here are a whole bunch of techniques that can give you extra powers. Some examples (with more details in the article):

When you get lots of rejections you stop fearing it. This makes you unstoppable.
The world wants you to be normal. F*ck being normal. That’s when being extraordinary becomes impossible.
Working for yourself means you can earn less income than a normal salary and still make more due to tax reasons.
Everything in life has a tax. Example: attracting a few haters is the tax on being a writer. Pay the tax and don’t complain.
Not knowing what to do and taking action anyway is a superpower.
The person we lie to the most is ourselves.
Experiment in life so you take a few risks. A risk that can’t bankrupt you is a good one.

https://medium.com/mind-cafe/cheat-codes-for-life-i-know-at-36-that-i-wish-i-knew-at-26-294f6e865db5.

View at Medium.com

Solving poverty with cash?

You’ve heard this refrain before — giving money to homeless people is not the best way to help them because it might be squandered, or spent on harmful habits. But a new Canadian study makes a powerful case to the contrary…. Researchers gave 50 recently homeless people a lump sum of 7,500 Canadian dollars (nearly $5,700). They followed the cash recipients’ life over 12-18 months and compared their outcomes to that of a control group who didn’t receive the payment. The preliminary findings, which will be peer-reviewed next year, show that those who received cash were able to find stable housing faster, on average. By comparison, those who didn’t receive cash lagged about 12 months behind in securing more permanent housing.

“One of the things that was most striking is that most people who received the cash knew immediately what they wanted to do with that money, and that just flies in the face of stereotypes,” Williams told CNN. For example, she explained some cash recipients knew they wanted to use the money to move into housing, or invest in transportation — getting a bike, or taking their cars to the repair shop to be able to keep their jobs. Others wanted to purchase computers. A number of them wanted to start their own small businesses. “People very much know what they need, but we often don’t equip them with the intervention or the services that really empowers them with choice and dignity to move forward on their own terms,” Williams said.

Although note that the group of homeless people was preselected:

Project participants were carefully screened for program eligibility to ensure the highest likelihood of success. Eligibility criteria include: age of recipients, length of time homeless, Canadian citizen or permanent resident, and degree of functionality (mental health and severity of substance and alcohol use). Our goals in designing these criteria were to support participants to the highest degree possible, assess their readiness for change, and reduce any risk of harm.

Fifty individuals were randomly selected to receive a one-time cash transfer of $7,500.

Still useful, though:

The study shows there are advantages for the taxpayer, too.

According to the research, reducing the number of nights spent in shelters by the 50 study participants who received cash saved approximately 8,100 Canadian dollars per person per year, or about 405,000 Canadian dollars over one year for all 50 participants.

CNN report: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/09/americas/direct-giving-homeless-people-vancouver-trnd/index.html.

New Leaf Project: https://forsocialchange.org/new-leaf-project-overview.

Five famous mistakes in songs

Roxanne by The Police:

Inspired by their time in Paris, Sting wrote Roxanne as the story of a man who falls in love with a prostitute after having observed many such ladies outside the band’s hotel room. With a seedy and almost teasing tone to the song, it seemed that the laugh heard at the beginning of Roxanne was something added intentionally. After all, it seemed to compliment the song’s tone and subject matter perfectly.

However, this was revealed to be a complete accident that the band decided to keep in the final recording. It turns out that while in the studio, Sting had wanted to sit down and relax for a moment. Rather than sit on a chair, the singer inadvertently rested his buttocks on the studio’s piano and produced a sound that everyone felt was both amusing and somewhat appropriate for the song.

Also: