Traffic lights were invented to improve pedestrian safety, but they also created streets that put cars first. But what if traffic lights could respond to the actual conditions at the intersection — perhaps stay red for an elderly walker or turn green for a crowded bus? In this episode, we explore an innovation that could change the hierarchy of the street: adaptive traffic lights.
City of the Future is produced by Benjamen Walker and Andrew Callaway. Our hosts are Vanessa Quirk and Eric Jaffe. Mix by Sharif Youssef. Music is by Adaam James Levine-Areddy (check out his band at amsterdamlost.com). Art is by Tim Kau. Special thanks to all who made this episode possible: Willa Ng, Ryan Vilim, Richard Saylor, Kara Oehler, Claire Mullen, Taylor Wizener, and Sven Kreiss.
Today, we're talking about the big names on the campaign trail in the final days before Election Day, and Big Tech's open letter about a possible government policy.
Plus: an HBO blackout for some customers and House of Cards legacy as its final season arrives.
Those stories and more in less than 10 minutes.
Award-winning broadcast journalist and former TV news reporter Erica Mandy breaks it all down for you.
Head to www.theNewsWorthy.com to read more about any of the stories mentioned today (or see below).
Amanda Holmes reads Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let America Be America Again.” Have a suggestion for a poem? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
Today's Rapid Response Friday revisits some cases we've previously discussed with recent positive developments: the Summer Zervos lawsuit and the future of political gerrymandering in Pennsylvania.
We begin with the Zervos lawsuit we first covered in Episode 176, in which a state trial court judge has ordered Donald Trump to respond to discovery served by Zervos's attorney. What's next for the President and why does it have Yodel Mountain implications? You'll have to listen and find out!
After that, we revisit our discussion from Episodes 146 and 148 regarding the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's opinion redrawing congressional maps in that state. The U.S. Supreme Court -- and yes, that's the Brett Kavanaugh-and-Neil-Gorsuch-laden Supreme Court! -- just declined to intervene to protect the Republicans. Why is that, and how is that a map forward? We tell all!
Then, we return to the Gary Hart story we discussed last episode. Was Hart really set up? Listen and find out!
Finally, we end with an all new Thomas Takes The Bar Exam #100 that is the dreaded real property question Thomas needs to get right in order to hit "60% at the half." Can he do it?!?? You'll have to listen and find out! And, of course, if you'd like to play along with us, just retweet our episode on Twitter or share it on Facebook along with your guess and the #TTTBE hashtag. We'll release the answer on next Tuesday's episode along with our favorite entry!
Appearances
None! If you'd like to have either of us as a guest on your show, drop us an email at openarguments@gmail.com.
Federal tactics aimed at enforcing immigration law should be very concerning to law-abiding American citizens. Matthew Feeney discusses the findings of his new paper.
President Trump wanted to make this the election of the caravan. For red state democrats, that’s becoming the case. So with only days to go until midterms how will Trump’s immigration rhetoric shape close races? Slate’s Jim Newell joins us today to discuss the state of red state democrats. Plus, BuzzFeed’s Caroline O’Donovan spent the day in Mountain View, CA at Google’s headquarters to cover the walkout of its employees in protest of what they say is the company's lenient treatment of executives accused of sexual misconduct. She joins us to debrief on the day out West.
On The Gist, Pew’s analysis of European opinion surveys is out. Let’s look at Greece!
In the interview, the American electorate has come to sort itself not just on political issues, but by worldview. Life is either a gauntlet of hazards (say Republicans) or an array of sights to see (as the Dems think). In their latest book, Prius or Pickup?, political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler warn that these philosophical differences are sharper than what separated the voting blocs of previous generations.
In the Spiel, Trump is out with a racist political ad, surprising precisely no one.
The answer stretches back to 1820, when California was still a part of Spain.
Reported by Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice, or use the hashtag #BayCurious.
Tether, the company behind the controversial stablecoin of the same name, published a letter purporting to be from Deltec Bank and Trust Limited today, confirming that it has about $1.8 billion in its account as of October 31. However, the letter - dated November 1 - does not have a name attached to it, and the signature is essentially a curve.
Coinbase’s head of trading, Hunter Merghart, has resigned after just six months on the job, according to individuals familiar with the situation.
Dapper Labs, the company behind the development of the ethereum-based Crypto Kitties, just raised another $15 million from Google Ventures, SamsungNEXT and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as some groups not usually associated with venture investing such as William Morris Endeavour and aXiomatic.
The New York Department of Financial Services has just issued its 12th BitLicense, this time to a bitcoin ATM operator called CoinSource.
Fake news, whether truly phony or merely unpalatable, has become an inescapable trope for modern media consumers. But apart from its propagandist provenance, misinformation and disinformation in our media diets is a genuine threat. Sociologist Nick Adams, in this Social Science Bites podcast, offers hope that a tool he’s developed can improve the media literacy of the populace.
That tool, known as Public Editor, allows trained volunteers to do one of seven assessment tasks within 15 minutes of looking at passages from a news article. Several volunteers will answer a series of questions based on the passage that’s meant to elicit information about the passage’s logical accuracy and critical thinking, and a ‘credibility score’ to be posted on the article results.
Public Editor, Adams tells interview David Edmonds, will display “article labels that will show and point out for a news reader, as they are reading, inferential mistakes, argumentative fallacies, psychological biases.” And because this will all be done within 30 minutes of the article arriving at Public Editor – and hence before readers can allow their biases to cement around what they’ve read -- “this is going to change how people read the news and raise their media literacy.”
While there will be naysayers, Adams defends Public Editor’s intent and structure. “This whole endeavor is about building legitimacy, building trust, through a social process. We’ve codified that social process, and substantiated it, in code, in software, in a way that’s totally transparent.”
Adams’ wider interests dovetail with Public Editor – his interest in social science technology and on social issues. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California Berkeley, where he founded the Computational Text Analysis Working Group at the university’s D-Lab and the interdisciplinary Text Across Domains initiative at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He is currently the CEO of Thusly, Inc, which developed TagWorks, a web-based content analysis software for researchers.
“Right now,” he tells Edmonds, “we have more words to analyze than we’ve ever had in the history of history. That’s because we’re generating so many every single day but also because we’re digitizing ancient records going back millennia. As a social scientist,” he adds, “I’m really excited to get my hands on that data and get rich information out of it.”
Explaining that “rich data” can – but doesn’t have to be – “big data,” Adams drew an example from his own work.
“So I might be looking at something like trying to understand police and protester interactions by looking at the Occupy movement. And I can look at 8,000 news articles, which is not very much – it’s not even going to tax your laptop to process that amount of data. But when you start to put sociological concepts into the data as labels that you can count and then put into time series, multi-level models, you’re starting to talk about very rich data that afford you the ability to understand social processes like we couldn’t before.”
