Link Blog: April 14, 2019

been sitting on this list awhile…

Teen boys rated their female classmates based on looks. The girls fought back. I am pleasantly surprised to report that at least one of the misogynistic boys may have learned from this experience.

Sci-Hub and Alexandra basic information: Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of Sci-Hub, talks about who she is and why she created Sci-Hub.

For decades, Garfield telephones kept washing ashore in France. Now the mystery has been solved. A shipping container of classic Garfield phones was finally found wedged inside a cave alongside cliffs hanging over the sea.

‘We’re doomed’: Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention. “With doom ahead, making a case for cycling as the primary mode of transport is almost irrelevant. We’ve got to stop burning fossil fuels. So many aspects of life depend on fossil fuels, except for music and love and education and happiness. These things, which hardly use fossil fuels, are what we must focus on.”

Nigerian Hospitals Are Locking Up Women Unable to Pay Their Childbirth Bills. A chilling article about what’s actually a global phenomenon known as hospital detention.

Vietnamese supermarkets go back to leaves, leaving plastic bags. In happier news, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such pretty packaging.

Counting the Countless: Why data science is a profound threat for queer people. “We are attempting to negotiate with a system that is fundamentally out to constrain us.”

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong: An extensive, but not exhaustive, summary of all the ways science, medicine, and the media is harming fat people in its mission to eradicate people of size.

The World Economy Is A Pyramid Scheme, Steven Chu Says. “Increased economic prosperity and all economic models supported by governments and global competitors are based on having more young people, workers, than older people. Two schemes come to mind. One is the pyramid scheme. The other is the Ponzi scheme. I’m not going to explain them both to you, you can look it up. But it’s based on growth, in various forms.”

Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse: The end of the article best sums it up: “what if all the fixing and mitigating and adapting fail? Perhaps we will have become worthy human beings, having acted during this time of crisis with extraordinary love and integrity. We will turn toward one another and all the beings on the planet, with clear and humble love, knowing we are one living whole. On bended knee, we will weep in abject gratitude for the gift of life itself entrusted to us. In this is profound meaning and purpose.”

Sleep or Die: Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Explains How Sleep Can Restore or Imperil Our Health. “Adults have ‘stigmatized sleep with the label of laziness.” We are in the midst of a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic” and lack of sleep can be attributed to loss of creativity, poor short-term memory, mood swings, decreased immune response, and higher risk of heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.

Link Blog: March 22, 2019

If it’s not absurd, it’s depressing… but this week, it’s probably both.

Privacy is becoming a luxury: what data leaks are like for the poor. Poorer people are less likely to have the time or money to fight back against data leaks, like the one from the Seattle Housing Authority last month, potentially making them bigger targets, since attackers know they’re more likely to get away with it.

Floriday’s war on drugs made chocolate and cheese illegal. This is what happens when policy is decided by people who know nothing about science.

The Government Is Using the Most Vulnerable People to Test Facial Recognition Software: NIST’s “Facial Recognition Verification Testing program depends on images of children who have been exploited for child pornography; U.S. visa applicants, especially those from Mexico; and people who have been arrested and are now deceased. Additional images are drawn from the Department of Homeland Security documentation of travelers boarding aircraft in the U.S. and individuals booked on suspicion of criminal activity.” Obviously, individuals probably never consented to the use of their likeness for this purpose.

The Companies Vying to Build the Border Wall Seem Shady as Hell: From 2018, but still relevant. The companies bidding on Trump’s border wall catastrophe have concerning pasts, from claiming to mentor minority-owned businesses (and not really doing it) to actual prison time.

California jury finds Monsanto’s Roundup caused a man’s cancer: this is the second civil suit where the company has been found at fault for not warning people of the risks.

Court Says VA Was Wrong in Denying Vietnam Veterans Benefits: in February, the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the VA’s decision to deny disability benefits to Navy veterans who were sickened by Agent Orange exposure. The decision could affect 90,000 vets, as well as their children who may also have been sickened or disabled by AO exposure.

For Larger Customers, Eating Out Is Still a Daunting Experience: “For people who identify as large, plus-size or fat, dining out can be a social and physical minefield. Chairs with arms or impossibly small seats leave marks and bruises. Meals are spent in pain, or filled with worry that a flimsy chair might collapse.” A timely article about what it’s like to go out to eat as a larger person, and what’s happening to improve the experience.

MuckRock’s annual FOIA March Madness is here again: and there are stickers!

Links

The Ethics of Web Performance: a compelling discussion about the modern web’s impact on accessibility and the environment.

Nefarious LinkedIn: It turns out that LinkedIn scans’ users browsers for extension usage. Why is that? Why encrypt and bury the information it finds? I don’t know the answers, but this plugin will help you detect what LinkedIn is looking for.

The Norwegian Art of the Packed Lunch: while a traditional Norwegian lunch of bread with cheese or meat is completely off limits for me as someone with celiac disease and food allergies, the concept of eating the same simple lunch every day on a set schedule as a means of alleviating decision fatigue is very appealing.

Tennessee doctors are paid to review applications to the federal disability program. How much they earn depends on how fast they work. Some doctors work very fast. Highlighting the corruption and flaws with the disability system… Tennessee is not unique, but The Tennessean did a hell of a job investigating that state and the harm it’s caused to disabled people who need benefits.

Stop The Rock Stacking: There’s a recent trend for tourists to stack rocks randomly in nature, which is disrespectful and can be downright harmful to nature. Stop it. Visit Aruba also explains why rock stacking is harmful.

I Was Pregnant and in Crisis. All the Doctors and Nurses Saw Was an Incompetent Black Woman: “What I remember most about the whole ordeal, groggy from trauma and pain and narcotics, is how nothing about who I was in any other context mattered to the assumptions of my incompetence. I spoke in the way one might expect of someone with a lot of formal education. I had health insurance. I was married. All of my status characteristics screamed ‘competent,’ but nothing could shut down what my blackness screams when I walk into the room.”

Happy New Year!

I am still looking for a job, and one thing that both amuses and saddens me is that the more time passes without finding the right job, the more experience I’m getting to qualify for the right job. Ironic.

So here’s what’s new:

  • The University of Michigan and Coursera have created another fantastic Python 3 specialization, building on the Python for Everybody specialization. I’ve finished the first three courses and am waiting for the last two to open.
  • Lollipop Cloud Project is going well. We are working through some hardware issues with our board of choice, and deploying more cool stuff like Plume, a federated blogging platform.
  • I don’t do New Years resolutions, but I’ve decided to start talking more openly about being disabled, and specifically about being a disabled job seeker.
  • I’ve also decided to start posting links (perhaps weekly) that I find interesting. I don’t care for Reddit (too much bigotry and abuse), and I’m not so active on social media, but I like to save links I find interesting.

#100DaysofCode Day 11

I took the previous day‘s code for the Morse Translator and changed it to include list comprehension.

Through a series of unfortunate events, I had an unexpected allergic reaction two days in a row. One reaction often throws me for a loop for a day or two, requiring extra rest, but two in a row have left me feeling pretty wiped. It can take a short minute to get back in the swing of things when something like this happens (I partly blame the Benadryl hangover). This is one of life’s minor annoyances when living with chronic illness or disability. Some annoyances are bigger than others, of course. This could’ve been much worse, all things considered.

#100DaysofCode Day 1

Happy new year, friends. I spent most of the holiday season working on the wd4e specialization, and finished intro to CSS3, interactivity with JavaScript, and advanced styling with responsive design. My capstone begins in March.

When I first read about 100 Days of Code, I realized I needed this kind of motivation, and I’ve been focusing on developing a code-something-everyday habit… and opted not to blog about it. I want to track my progress more linearly, so I’m going to change that today, and restart the clock to Day 1.

Day 1: Finished drafting contributing.md and editing code of conduct for the Aardwolf project (PR link). I’ve been tracking my job search in using mySQL and a CRUD UI I designed myself, and I spent some time tweaking the UI for that. For privacy reasons, I’ll just share my CSS using a representative table of cats.

This exercise is a reminder that I prefer back-end to front-end work. I am colorblind and the things I find attractive, you might find hideous. My personal style leans in a simpler direction: black, white, shades of gray, which also tend to be much more accessible to a broader audience. But there’s something relaxing about playing with color pallets– kind of like coloring with a fresh box of crayons! So for this exercise, don’t judge– I don’t feel bad about it. πŸ™‚

prioritizing accessibility

I’m going to be attending a teach-out about the internet and society. The instructors requested questions and comments before the teach-out begins at the end of the month, but the phone number is a google voice number with a limited voicemail length and I didn’t realize they didn’t want a WHOLE me-length comment. πŸ™‚ So I’ll just post it all here:

I’d like to discuss accessibility and the internet.

I first discovered the internet in 1995. I grew up in rural New England, in a very isolated and sheltered area. My father was from Brooklyn, so I knew that the world was much bigger than the tiny little farm town where we lived, even if I hadn’t actually visited these places myself.

When I got online for the first time, it changed my whole world.

Suddenly I could communicate and collaborate with people from places I’d only dreamed of. Suddenly my world became much larger than the tiny little town with its one general store and no traffic lights.

My new internet friends were mostly tech workers and researchers, but we were a diverse group. I had friends who spoke little English. I had friends not just outside New England, but in other countries on other continents.

This was mind blowing, after graduating from a class with 150 students. Walls came down. Borders and geographic location became nearly irrelevant.

It made the world bigger and smaller all at the same time.

I had friends who were blind, I had friends who were physically disabled and could only type using one button on a mouse. The internet, and the computers we used to access the internet, were improving, and it felt like this was becoming the great equalizer. Differences and disabilities became less of a barrier on the internet.

People with disabilities have historically been isolated in institutions or other oppressive situations where we get little access to the outside world, and now suddenly we can access the world from our bed.

But now, over 20 years later, I feel like we have regressed. The internet has simultaneously become more integral AND more exclusive than ever.

We exclude Deaf and hard of hearing people by refusing to caption videos or post transcripts.

We exclude people with vision impairments when we use images without descriptions, excessive graphics and popups, invasive advertisements, auto-playing videos with sound, low contrast styling, and just plain old bad design.

We exclude people with seizure disorders by using flashing animations without warning.

We exclude people with PTSD by posting unsolicited violence without content warnings.

Accessibility isn’t just about helping those of us with disabilities. It’s about helping those of us with limited data plans, without high speed internet, with older slower devices, with lower incomes, with language barriers.

Accessibility doesn’t just help those of us who need these accommodations right now. Prioritizing accessibility means that people who become disabled tomorrow will still have access. Prioritizing accessibility means that as today’s developers age, they’ll still be able to use their own products when they’re 100 years old and relying on their reading glasses and hearing aids.

I want accessibility to be a higher priority online. I’m often met with significant resistance when I request accessibility improvements, sometimes because the perceived demand isn’t high enough to justify the time and money required to improve it, and sometimes because the content producer simply doesn’t think it’s important enough to prioritize.

Let’s prioritize accessibility.

And let’s talk about how we can make that happen.

internet history, and moving forward

I completed Dr. Chuck Severence’s Internet History, Technology, and Security course on Coursera (verify here), and it was an outstanding overview of how we arrived where we’re at today, and helped me wrap my head around the backbone of our wired world.

My only real experience with layered architecture was a very abstract understanding of the OSI model, and this course focused on the TCP/IP. I’ve realized that network architecture is really interesting, and I’d like to learn more.

Learning more Python and becoming more comfortable with online learning environments has helped make learning more python and becoming more comfortable with online learning environments easier and more fun. There’s been a bit of a learning curve not only because this is a new format for me, but there are accessibility concerns I needed to navigate: Utilizing transcripts, bad connections, resource-intensive applications, avoiding flashing or glitchy videos, avoiding exacerbating chronic pain.

This has all renewed my interest in Free Code Camp, which wasn’t a good fit when I first tried a few months ago, but it turns out that it’s actually really awesome. My tribute page to Victor of Aveyron was a Free Code Camp assignment, and an opportunity to learn more about disability history.