(Steve Schaefer/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution/TNS)

Dear Commons Community,

The pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on Black and other children of color, leading to higher rates of severe cases, hospitalizations and deaths caused by social and economic factors, a new report finds.

The report was released yesterday by the Black Coalition Against COVID in partnership with the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine, along with other historically Black medical schools and Black health care organizations. It was inspired by the widespread belief that children were not as susceptible to COVID-19.  As reported by Donovan J. Thomas for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Since the pandemic began, children account for over 18% of COVID-19 cases, with more than 14 million positive tests from children. Researchers believe this number is likely to be an undercount because testing was not available for children until May 2020 and they were tested less often than adults because they were believed to be at lower risk for infection.

According to the report, 1,556 children have lost their lives to COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Compared with white children, Black children died 2.7 times more often than white children, according to the report, and were hospitalized 2.2 times more often than white children, something that vaccination status had a direct impact on.

“Misinformation and mistrust were very key issues in influencing the disparate rates of hospitalizations, deaths, etcetera from COVID-19 amongst our Black population and Black children,” said Aye Obe, a research fellow at the Satcher Health Leadership Institute and one of the report’s authors. “It influenced perceptions people had about staying safe, observing necessary protocols to protect not just themselves, but their children, and influenced vaccination rates.”

Monday’s report was compiled by drawing on studies conducted by other agencies over a span of two years.

Citing a limited study of hospitals in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, 3 out of 4 children hospitalized with severe cases of COVID-19 were reported as Black (23%) or Hispanic (51%).

Additionally, Black children make up 31% of the multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) cases that reported race and ethnicity information, with Hispanic children accounting for 26% of cases. MIS-C is a resulting condition of COVID-19 that can affect the heart, blood vessels and other organs, and can lead to frequent doctor visits.

Vaccines for children under 18 were authorized later in the pandemic than adult vaccines, and in most of the country, Black children were vaccinated at lower rates than white children.

Of the Black children hospitalized due to COVID-19, 30% had preexisting medical conditions, compared with 15% of white children, the report said.

The report also considered “social determinants of health,” which are social and economic factors that influence health. Poverty rates and food and housing insecurity increased for Black and Latino families during the pandemic. Many people within these communities also live in multi-generational households and work jobs considered essential, leaving them exposed to COVID-19 at higher rates.

The report noted 65% of the more than 200,000 children left orphaned as a result of death of a primary caregiver are of a racial or ethnic minority.

“What played out for children was the exact same thing that played out for adults,” Obe explained. “There were factors that engender health and also health inequities that were put in place so many years before the pandemic, and right when the pandemic happened, all of these things came into play.”

Learning gaps that children faced due to the pandemic were also highlighted in the report, which found that Black and other children of color could be six to 12 months behind in learning compared with four to eight months for white children.

With the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration set to expire on May 11, many foresee that the loss of pandemic safety nets will show unequal levels of hardships Black children continue to face.

The report’s authors made recommendations to improve outcomes, including steps to address access to health care, mental health social, economic and political factors and more.

“We believe addressing the social and political determinants of health, which are key drivers of the negative outcomes we saw amongst Black children, the Black population and other minority groups, will be a good place to start acknowledging, understanding and taking positive steps to mitigate the inequities we have in health care,” Obe said.

“There is no magic pill that we can take as nation that can cure everything that has happened.”

The Black Coalition Against COVID is a Washington, D.C.-based community initiative that provides science-based information about COVID-19 and the vaccine development process to help save Black lives.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Stephanie Grisham, during an interview (see video above) with CNN’s Jim Acosta, weighed in on the Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit.

The former press secretary, after Acosta remarked about a perceived “hand in glove” working relationship between the two parties, said Fox News stars such as Judge Jeanine Pirro, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson would call her at the White House.

“If I didn’t get back to them right away, they would then call the president and then I would get a talking to for not speaking with them,” Grisham said.

“We did work hand in hand with them and that came at the president’s direction. If he didn’t like something, we were to immediately call Fox and have them fix it or try to make a new story out of it, etc.”

Sleaze sleaze, sleaze all around!

Tony

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvAdahLczGk

Dear Commons Community,

It was an interesting night at the Oscars even though there wasn’t any unplanned drama like someone being slapped in the face as happened last year.  “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was  a big winner with Oscars for Best Picture,  Best Lead Actress, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Supporting Actor.   Ke Huy Quan who won for Best Supporting Actor was in tears (see video above)  and gave a heartfelt thanks to all who encouraged him in his career especially his mother and wife.  Below is the full list of Oscar winners and nominees.

A good night for the movies!

Tony

——————————————————–

Best Picture

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” — Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert and Jonathan Wang, producers

“All Quiet on the Western Front” — Malte Grunert, producer

“Avatar: The Way of Water” — James Cameron and Jon Landau, producers

“The Banshees of Inisherin” — Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin and Martin McDonagh, producers

“Elvis” — Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick and Schuyler Weiss, producers

“The Fabelmans” — Kristie Macosko Krieger, Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, producers

“Tár” — Todd Field, Alexandra Milchan and Scott Lambert, producers

“Top Gun: Maverick” — Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison and Jerry Bruckheimer, producers

“Triangle of Sadness” — Erik Hemmendorff and Philippe Bober, producers

“Women Talking” — Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Frances McDormand, producers

Best Lead Actress

Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)

Cate Blanchett (“Tár”)

Ana de Armas (“Blonde”)

Andrea Riseborough (“To Leslie”)

Michelle Williams (“The Fabelmans”)

Best Lead Actor

Brendan Fraser (“The Whale”)

Austin Butler (“Elvis”)

Colin Farrell (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)

Paul Mescal (“Aftersun”)

Bill Nighy (“Living”)

Best Director

Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)

Martin McDonagh (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)

Steven Spielberg (“The Fabelmans”)

Todd Field (“Tár”)

Ruben Östlund (“Triangle of Sadness”)

Best Film Editing

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” — Paul Rogers

“The Banshees of Inisherin” — Mikkel E.G. Nielsen

“Elvis” — Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond

“Tár” — Monika Willi

“Top Gun: Maverick” — Eddie Hamilton

Best Original Song

“Naatu Naatu” from “RRR” — music by M.M. Keeravaani, lyric by Chandrabose

“Applause” from “Tell It Like a Woman” — music and lyric by Diane Warren

“Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick” — music and lyric by Lady Gaga and BloodPop

“Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — music by Tems, Rihanna, Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Goransson; lyric by Tems and Ryan Coogler

“This Is a Life” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — music by Ryan Lott, David Byrne and Mitski; lyric by Ryan Lott and David Byrne

Best Sound

“Top Gun: Maverick” — Mark Weingarten, James H. Mather, Al Nelson, Chris Burdon and Mark Taylor

“All Quiet on the Western Front” — Viktor Prášil, Frank Kruse, Markus Stemler, Lars Ginzel and Stefan Korte

“Avatar: The Way of Water” — Julian Howarth, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, Dick Bernstein, Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers and Michael Hedges

“The Batman” — Stuart Wilson, William Files, Douglas Murray and Andy Nelson

“Elvis” — David Lee, Wayne Pashley, Andy Nelson and Michael Keller

Best Adapted Screenplay

“Women Talking” — Sarah Polley

“All Quiet on the Western Front” — Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell

“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” — Rian Johnson

“Living” — Kazuo Ishiguro

“Top Gun: Maverick” — screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie; story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks

Best Original Screenplay

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” — Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

“The Banshees of Inisherin” — Martin McDonagh

“The Fabelmans” — Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner

“Tár” — Todd Field

“Triangle of Sadness” — Ruben Östlund

Best Visual Effects

“Avatar: The Way of Water” — Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon and Daniel Barrett

“All Quiet on the Western Front” — Frank Petzold, Viktor Müller, Markus Frank and Kamil Jafar

“The Batman” — Dan Lemmon, Russell Earl, Anders Langlands and Dominic Tuohy

“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — Geoffrey Baumann, Craig Hammack, R. Christopher White and Dan Sudick

“Top Gun: Maverick” — Ryan Tudhope, Seth Hill, Bryan Litson and Scott R. Fisher

Best Original Score

“All Quiet on the Western Front” — Volker Bertelmann

“Babylon” — Justin Hurwitz

“The Banshees of Inisherin” — Carter Burwell

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” — Son Lux

“The Fabelmans” — John Williams

Best Production Design

“All Quiet on the Western Front” — production design by Christian M. Goldbeck, set decoration by Ernestine Hipper

“Avatar: The Way of Water” — production design by Dylan Cole and Ben Procter, set decoration by Vanessa Cole

“Babylon” — production design by Florencia Martin, set decoration by Anthony Carlino

“Elvis” — production design by Catherine Martin and Karen Murphy, set decoration by Bev Dunn

“The Fabelmans” — production design by Rick Carter, set decoration by Karen O’Hara

Best Animated Short Film

“The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” — Charlie Mackesy and Matthew Freud

“The Flying Sailor” — Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby

“Ice Merchants” — João Gonzalez and Bruno Caetano

“My Year of Dicks” — Sara Gunnarsdóttir and Pamela Ribon

“An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It” — Lachlan Pendragon

Best Documentary Short Film

“The Elephant Whisperers” — Kartiki Gonsalves and Guneet Monga

“Haulout” — Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev

“How Do You Measure a Year?” — Jay Rosenblatt

“The Martha Mitchell Effect” — Anne Alvergue and Beth Levison

“Stranger at the Gate” — Joshua Seftel and Conall Jones

Best International Feature Film

“All Quiet on the Western Front” (Germany)

“Argentina, 1985” (Argentina)

“Close” (Belgium)

“EO” (Poland)

“The Quiet Girl” (Ireland)

Best Costume Design

“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — Ruth E. Carter

“Babylon” — Mary Zophres

“Elvis” — Catherine Martin

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” — Shirley Kurata

“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” — Jenny Beavan

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

“The Whale” — Adrien Morot, Judy Chin and Anne Marie Bradley

“All Quiet on the Western Front” — Heike Merker and Linda Eisenhamerová

“The Batman” — Naomi Donne, Mike Marino and Mike Fontaine

“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — Camille Friend and Joel Harlow

“Elvis” — Mark Coulier, Jason Baird and Aldo Signoretti

Best Cinematography

“All Quiet on the Western Front” — James Friend

“Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” — Darius Khondji

“Elvis” — Mandy Walker

“Empire of Light” — Roger Deakins

“Tár” — Florian Hoffmeister

Best Live Action Short

“An Irish Goodbye” — Tom Berkeley and Ross White

“Ivalu” — Anders Walter and Rebecca Pruzan

“Le Pupille” — Alice Rohrwacher and Alfonso Cuarón

“Night Ride” — Eirik Tveiten and Gaute Lid Larssen

“The Red Suitcase” — Cyrus Neshvad

Best Documentary Feature Film

“Navalny” — Daniel Roher, Odessa Rae, Diane Becker, Melanie Miller and Shane Boris

“All That Breathes” — Shaunak Sen, Aman Mann and Teddy Leifer

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” — Laura Poitras, Howard Gertler, John Lyons, Nan Goldin and Yoni Golijov

“Fire of Love” — Sara Dosa, Shane Boris and Ina Fichman

“A House Made of Splinters” — Simon Lereng Wilmont and Monica Hellström

Best Supporting Actress

Jamie Lee Curtis (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)

Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”)

Hong Chau (“The Whale”)

Kerry Condon (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)

Stephanie Hsu (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)

Best Supporting Actor

Ke Huy Quan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)

Brendan Gleeson (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)

Brian Tyree Henry (“Causeway”)

Judd Hirsch (“The Fabelmans”)

Barry Keoghan (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)

Best Animated Feature Film

“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” — Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson, Gary Ungar and Alex Bulkley

“Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” — Dean Fleischer Camp, Elisabeth Holm, Andrew Goldman, Caroline Kaplan and Paul Mezey

“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” — Joel Crawford and Mark Swift

“The Sea Beast” — Chris Williams and Jed Schlanger

“Turning Red” — Domee Shi and Lindsey Collins

Dear Commons Community,

Fernando Braga is an amateur photographer who lives with his wife and kids in an apartment with direct view of the nearly 100-foot Christ the Redeemer monument, which portrays Jesus Christ with his arms open wide.

It was Braga’s determination as a photographer that he was able to capture a stunning time-lapse video and screenshots of lightning striking the sculpture, after more than 30 attempts.

“It was unbelievable at first. Like a dream come true, since I was trying for a long time. At that moment, I was expecting to get some lightning around the frame, but not like this one,” Braga told Yahoo News.

The Christ the Redeemer monument sits atop Mount Corcovado in Rio in the Tijuca Forest National Park, a rainforest within the city’s boundaries.

The breathtaking sight was caught during a flash storm that rocked the Brazilian coast on Feb. 10. The bolt of lightning struck the statue’s head, making it the perfect moment to capture a photo.

Notably, the Christ the Redeemer monument, the biggest representation of Jesus in the world, is more than 2,000 feet above Rio.

“Photography for me is just a hobby. I love to spend my spare time photographing,” Braga said. “At home, I have a really nice view of Christ the Redeemer, so I took a lot of photos of it. In sunsets, sunrise[s], with the moon, the sun, airplanes, helicopters, birds, etc. … So I decided to get one with lightning too.”

Incredible images!

See video below for additional photos.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former Vice President Mike Pence yesterday harshly criticized former President Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, widening the rift between the two men as they prepare to battle over the Republican presidential nomination.

“President Trump was wrong,” Pence said during remarks at the annual white-tie Gridiron Dinner attended by politicians and journalists. “I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”  As reported by the Associated Press.

Pence’s remarks were the sharpest condemnation yet from the once-loyal lieutenant who has often shied away from confronting his former boss. Trump has already declared his candidacy. Pence has not, but he’s been laying the groundwork to run.

In the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Trump pressured Pence to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory as he presided over the ceremonial certification of the results. Pence refused, and when rioters stormed the Capitol, some chanted that they wanted to “hang Mike Pence.”

The House committee that investigated the attack said in its final report that “the President of the United States had riled up a mob that hunted his own Vice President.”

With his remarks, Pence solidified his place in a broader debate within the Republican Party over how to view the attack. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, for example, recently provided Tucker Carlson with an archive of security camera footage from Jan. 6, which the Fox News host has used to downplay the day’s events and promote conspiracy theories.

“Make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace,” Pence said in his Gridiron Dinner remarks. “And it mocks decency to portray it any other way.”

Trump, meanwhile, has continued to spread lies about his election loss. He’s even spoken in support of the rioters and said he would consider pardoning them if he was reelected.

Speeches at the Gridiron Dinner are usually humorous affairs, where politicians poke fun at each other, and Pence did plenty of that as well.

He joked that Trump’s ego was so fragile, he wanted his vice president to sing “Wind Beneath My Wings” — one of the lines is “did you ever know that you’re my hero?” — during their weekly lunches.

He took another shot at Trump over classified documents.

“I read that some of those classified documents they found at Mar-a-Lago were actually stuck in the president’s Bible,” Pence said. “Which proves he had absolutely no idea they were there.”

Better late than never in coming forward Mr. Pence!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation seized the assets of Silicon Valley Bank yesterday, marking the largest bank failure since Washington Mutual during the height of the 2008 financial crisis.

The bank failed after depositors — mostly technology workers and venture capital-backed companies — began withdrawing their money creating a run on the bank. As reported by the Associated Press and CNN.

Silicon Valley was heavily exposed to tech industry and there is little chance of contagion in the banking sector as there was in the months leading up to the Great Recession more than a decade ago. Major banks have sufficient capital to avoid a similar situation.

The FDIC ordered the closure of Silicon Valley Bank and immediately took possession of all deposits at the bank Friday. The bank had $209 billion in assets and $175.4 billion in deposits as the time of failure, the FDIC said in a statement. It was unclear how much of deposits was above the $250,000 insurance limit at the moment.

Notably, the FDIC did not announce a buyer of Silicon Valley’s assets, which is typically when there’s an orderly wind down of a bank. The FDIC also seized the bank’s assets in the middle of the business day, a sign of how dire the situation had become.

The financial health of Silicon Valley Bank was increasingly in question this week after the bank announced plans to raise up to $1.75 billion in order to strengthen its capital position amid concerns about higher interest rates and the economy. Shares of SVB Financial Group, the parent company of Silicon Valley Bank, had plummeted nearly 70% before trading was halted before the opening bell on the Nasdaq.

CNBC reported that attempts to raise capital failed and the bank was now looking to sell itself.

Silicon Valley bank was not a small bank, it’s the 16th largest bank in the country, holding $210 billion in assets. It acts as a major financial conduit for venture capital-backed companies, which have been hit hard in the past 18 months as the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates and made riskier tech assets less attractive to investors.

Venture capital-backed companies were being reportedly advised to pull at least two months’ worth of “burn” cash out of Silicon Valley Bank to cover their expenses. Typically VC-backed companies are not profitable and how quickly they use the cash they need to run their businesses — their so-called “burn rate” — is a typically important metric for investors.

Diversified banks like Bank of America and JPMorgan pulled out of an early slump due to data released Friday by the Labor Department, but regional banks, particularly those with heavy exposure to the tech industry, were in decline.

Yet it has been a bruising week. Shares of major banks are down this week between 7% and 12%.

Not a good thing when a major bank fails!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

America’s employers added a substantial 311,000 jobs in February, putting pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates again to fight inflation.

The unemployment rate rose to 3.6%, from a 53-year low of 3.4%, as more Americans began searching for work but not all of them found jobs.  As reported by the Associated Pres.

Friday’s report from the government made clear that the nation’s job market remains fundamentally healthy, with many employers still eager to hire. Fed Chair Jerome Powell told Congress this week that the Fed would likely ratchet up its rate hikes if signs continued to point to a robust economy and persistently high inflation. A strong job market typically leads businesses to raise pay and then pass their higher labor costs on to customers through higher prices.

February’s sizable job growth shows that so far, hiring is continuing to strengthen this year after having eased in late 2022. From October through December, the average monthly job gain was 284,000. That average has surged to 351,000 for the past three months.

Economists pointed to other data in Friday’s report that suggested that the job market, while still hot, may be better balancing employers’ need for workers and the supply of unemployed people. More people have been coming off the sidelines to seek work, a trend that makes it easier for businesses to fill the millions of jobs that remain open.

The proportion of Americans who either have a job or are looking for one has risen for three straight months to 62.5%, the highest level since COVID struck three years ago. Still, it remains below its pre-pandemic level of 63.3%.

With more potential hires to choose from, employers seem under less pressure now to dangle higher pay to attract or retain workers. Average wage growth slowed in February, rising just 0.2%, to $33.09, the smallest monthly increase in a year. Measured year over year, though, hourly pay is up 4.6%, well above the pre-pandemic trend. Even so, that’s down from average annual gains above 5% last year.

What the Fed may decide to do about interest rates when it meets later this month remains uncertain. The Fed’s decision will rest, in part, on its assessment of Friday’s jobs data and next week’s report on consumer inflation in February. Last month, the government’s report on January inflation had raised alarms by showing that consumer prices had reaccelerated on a month-to-month basis.

Ahead of the February jobs data, many economists had said they thought the Fed would announce a substantial half-point increase in its key short-term interest rate, rather than a quarter point hike as it did at its meeting in February. Friday’s more moderate hiring and wage figures, though, led some analysts to suggest that the central bank may not need to move so aggressively at this month’s meeting.

“There’s clear signs of cooling when you dig deeper into the numbers,” said Mike Skordeles, head of economics at Truist, a bank. “I think it makes the case for the Fed to say … we’ll still hike rates, but we’re not going to do” a half-point hike.

The Fed’s final determination, though, will rest heavily on Tuesday’s report on consumer prices.

“Everything now hinges on February’s CPI report,” said Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics.

When the Fed tightens credit, it typically leads to higher rates on mortgages, auto loans, credit card borrowing and many business loans. Its rate hikes can cool spending and inflation, but they also raise the risk of a recession.

Even for workers who have received substantial pay raises, ongoing high inflation remains a burden. Consumer prices rose 6.4% in January compared with a year ago, driven up by the costs of food, clothing and rents, among other items.

Frustrated by wages that aren’t keeping up with inflation, Rodney Colbert, a cook at the Las Vegas convention center, joined a strike Thursday by the Culinary Workers union to demand better pay and benefits. Colbert said that his hourly pay was $4-$5 less than what cooks were paid at casinos on the Las Vegas Strip.

“I’ll average approximately 28 hours a week, and that’s not enough,” Colbert said. “Just in the past two years, my rent has gone up $400, so that’s a lot.”

Nationally, nearly all of last month’s hiring occurred in mostly lower-paid services industries, with a category that includes restaurants, bars, hotels and entertainment adding 105,000 jobs, its second straight month of strong gains. Warmer-than-usual weather likely contributed to the increase. With the weather likely allowing more building projects to continue, construction companies added 24,000 jobs.

Retailers added about 50,000 jobs last month, health care providers 63,000. Local and state governments — some of them flush with cash from stimulus programs — added 46,000 jobs.

Much of that job growth reflects continuing demand from Americans who have been increasingly venturing out to shop, eat out, travel and attend entertainment events — activities that were largely restricted during the height of COVID.

“We’ve created more jobs in two years than any administration has created in the first four years,” President Joe Biden said Friday about the employment report. “It means our economic plan is working.”

Economists note, however, that the very strength of the job market is itself contributing to the high inflation that continues to pressure millions of households.

In February, in contrast to the solid hiring in the services sector, manufacturers cut 4,000 jobs. And a sector that includes technology and communications workers shed 25,000 jobs, its third straight month of losses. It is a sign that some of the announced layoffs in the economy’s tech sector are being captured in the government’s data.

Last month, the government reported a surprising burst of hiring for January — 517,000 added jobs — though that gain was revised down slightly to 504,000 in Friday’s report. The vigorous job growth for January was the first in a series of reports to point to an accelerating economy at the start of the year. Sales at retail stores and restaurants also jumped, and inflation, according to the Fed’s preferred measure, rose from December to January at the fastest pace in seven months.

The stronger data reversed a cautiously optimistic narrative that the economy was cooling modestly — just enough, perhaps, to tame inflation without triggering a deep recession. Now, the economic outlook is hazier.

People working is  a good thing!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Violeta Berdejo-Espinola and Tatsuya Amano have a letter to the Editor of Science this morning questioning its recent editorial banning the use of text generated from AI in scientific articles. Here is the entire Berdejo-Espinola and Amano letter.

“In his Editorial “ChatGPT is fun, but not an author” (27 January, p. 313), Editor-in-Chief H. H. Thorp describes Science’s position on using artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific papers. The updated policy essentially bans the use of text generated from AI, machine learning, or similar algorithmic tools in articles. However, Thorp overlooks the potential of AI tools to improve equity in science by alleviating linguistic disparities.

Research has shown that nonnative English speakers need to invest much more effort than native English speakers when writing papers in English (¹). Journals are more likely to reject or request revisions before acceptance of papers written by nonnative English speakers (^{2, 3}). Human English translation and editing services are costly and time-consuming (⁴), creating a profound disadvantage for the career development and fair participation of nonnative English speakers in science.

Emerging AI tools, such as ChatGPT and DeepL, can proofread English text with high accuracy (^{5, 6}). The availability of quality, free (or affordable) English editing presents an opportunity for nonnative English speakers, especially those in low-income countries, who often cannot afford to use human English editing services (^{1, 4}). Reducing the technical and financial burden of editing and proofreading papers for nonnative English speakers would be a substantial step toward achieving equity in science.

Our relationship with AI should be a partnership, not a competition. Journal policies should allow authors to use AI tools to edit and proofread their manuscripts. Journal editors can ensure that humans wrote the original text by using the detection tools available [e.g., (⁷)]. In addition, they can request that authors declare the use of AI tools, as Nature does (⁸), or submit the original version as well as the AI-edited version of the manuscript for full transparency. Regardless of whether they use AI tools, authors will always be responsible for the language used and the content in their final text.”

I agree with the two authors on this.  I think we need to find ways to partner with AI not ban it.  Presently, I have twelve graduate students evaluating writing  papers using ChatGPT.   One of these students made the same comments as above about the benefits of this software for nonnative English speakers.

Tony

1. T. Amano et al., EcoEvoRxiv 10.32942/X29G6H (2022).
2. S. Politzer-Ahles, T. Girolamo, S. Ghali, J. Eng. Acad. Purp. 47, 100895 (2020).
3. A. L. Romero-Olivares, Science 10.1126/science.caredit.aaz7179 (2020).
4. V. Ramírez-Castañeda, PLOS ONE 15, e0238372 (2020).
5. A. Katnelson, Nature 609, 208 (2022).
6. S. Hun, Sci. Edit. 10, 1 (2023).
7. J. Hendrik Kirchner, L. Ahmad, S. Aaronson, J. Leike, “New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text,” OpenAI (2023); https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/.
8. Nature 613, 612 (2023).

Dear Commons Community,

Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on “woke,” but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed say the term means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” That includes not only three-fourths of Democrats but also more than a third of Republicans.

Overall, 39% say instead that the word reflects what has become the GOP political definition, “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.” That’s the view of 56% of Republicans.

The findings raise questions about whether Republican campaign promises to ban policies at schools and workplaces they denounce as “woke” could boost a contender in the party’s primaries but put them at odds with broader public opinion in the general election.

Independents, by 51%-45%, say “woke” means being aware of social injustice, not being overly politically correct.  As reported by USA Today.

“Most Americans understand that to be woke is to be tuned in to injustices around us,” said Cliff Young of Ipsos. “But for a key segment of Republicans who make up the Trump-DeSantis base, ‘woke’ is a clear trigger for the worst of the politically correct, emerging multicultural majority.”

In the early 20th century, “woke” was generally used as a call for Black people around the world to “wake up” to racial oppression. After the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the term gained wider usage to describe awareness of the continuing legacy of racial discrimination and systematic oppression.

Now conservatives have adopted the term as a rallying cry in the culture wars, signaling their opposition to everything from the teaching of the ongoing effects of slavery to the use of gender-neutral pronouns.

“We will never surrender to the woke mob,” Ron DeSantis declared in his victory speech when he won a second term as Florida governor in November. Former President Donald Trump last week accused President Joe Biden of engineering “a woke takeover of the entire federal government.”

Even South Carolina’s Sen. Tim Scott, a Black man who discusses how racism has affected his life, has derided “woke corporations” and “woke prosecutors” as negative forces in American life.

Trump has announced his campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination, and DeSantis is seen as likely to be his leading challenger, although he hasn’t formally announced his candidacy. Scott has also indicated he is considering a presidential bid.

Across party lines, about 1 in 4 say they don’t know enough about what the term means to judge whether it is a compliment or a slur.

The USA TODAY/Ipsos poll of 1,023 adults was taken Friday through Sunday using KnowledgePanel, Ipsos’ online probability-based panel. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.

I am a woke and proud of it!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull had a guest essay in yesterday’s New York Times questioning the capabilities and the promise of artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT.  Dr. Chomsky and Dr. Roberts are professors of linguistics. Dr. Watumull is a director of artificial intelligence at a science and technology company.  My student Essie Brew-Hammond alerted me to this piece.  Here is an excerpt.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that to live in a time of great peril and promise is to experience both tragedy and comedy, with “the imminence of a revelation” in understanding ourselves and the world. Today our supposedly revolutionary advancements in artificial intelligence are indeed cause for both concern and optimism. Optimism because intelligence is the means by which we solve problems. Concern because we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty.

That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.

The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

Chomsky and his co-writers make a valid criticism that AI programs such as ChatGPT are not ready  by any means to replace the wonders of the human brain.  However, it cannot be denied that these programs  keep chipping away and keep providing more “intelligence” capabilities.

Tony