Tag: USA

A World Without Sci-Hub – Palladium

Aaron Swartz was 26 years old when he took his own life. He did so under the shadow of legal prosecution, pursued by government lawyers intent on maximal punishment. If found guilty, he potentially faced up to 50 years in prison and a $1 million dollar fine. Swartz’s crime was not only legal, but political. He had accessed a private computer network and gained possession of highly valuable information with the goal of sharing it. His actions threatened some of the most powerful, connected, and politically protected groups in the country. Their friends in the government were intent on sending a message.

It’s the kind of story you would expect about some far-off political dissident. But Swartz took his life in Brooklyn on a winter day in 2013 and his prosecutor was the U.S. federal government. When Swartz died, he was under indictment for 13 felony charges related to his use of an MIT computer to download too many scientific articles from the academic database JSTOR, ostensibly for the purpose of making them freely available to the public. Ultimately, Swartz potentially faced more jail time for downloading academic papers than he would have if he had helped Al Qaeda build a nuclear weapon. Even the Criminal Code of the USSR stipulated that those who stored and distributed anti-Soviet literature only faced five to seven years in prison. While prosecutors later pointed toward a potential deal for less time, Aaron would still have been labeled a felon for his actions—and to boot, JSTOR itself had reached a civil settlement and didn’t even pursue its own lawsuit.

But Aaron’s cause lived on. This September marks the ten-year anniversary of Sci-Hub, the online “shadow library” that provides access to millions of research papers otherwise hidden behind prohibitive paywalls. Founded by the Kazakhstani computer scientist Alexandra Elbakyan—popularly known as science’s “pirate queen”—Sci-Hub has grown to become a repository of over 85 million academic papers.

The site is popular globally, used by millions of people—many of whom would otherwise not be able to finish their degrees, advise their patients, or use text mining algorithms to make new scientific discoveries. Sci-Hub has become the unacknowledged foundation that helps the whole enterprise of academia to function. 

Even when they do not need to use Sci-Hub, the superior user experience it offers means that many people prefer to use the illegal site rather than access papers through their own institutional libraries. It is difficult to say how many ideas, grants, publications, and companies have been made possible by Sci-Hub, but it seems undeniable that Elbakyan’s ten-year-old website has become a crucial component of contemporary scholarship.  
— Read on palladiummag.com/2021/09/24/a-world-without-sci-hub/

A World Without Sci-Hub – Palladium

David Wiley has proposed that the federal government take the intellectual property of academic publishers using the power of eminent domain. The fees that public universities have already paid (the University of California system alone paid $13 million to Elsevier in 2021) could go quite a ways towards the “just compensation” for property seizure specified in the Fifth Amendment. 

Recently, supporters of Sci-Hub have begun creating copies of the site’s immense archive in case it is taken down. Their hope is to make Sci-Hub “un-censorable.” But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The “effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic publishers themselves might just pave the way there. Imagine it: a 21st-century Library of Alexandria, a truly utopian creation, gifted to the world by Uncle Sam.
— Read on palladiummag.com/2021/09/24/a-world-without-sci-hub/

American Economic Association

Medicaid provides health insurance for millions of America’s most vulnerable people. In 2015, it covered 40 percent of all children at a cost of roughly $90 billion. Some have worried that this price tag is too high. 

But in a paper in the American Economic Review, author Andrew Goodman-Baconasserts that Medicaid coverage for children has more than paid for itself in the long run.

Goodman-Bacon found that Medicaid eligibility in early childhood reduced mortality and disability and increased employment up to 50 years later. As a result, young children in the 1960s and 1970s, who grew up with Medicaid, became healthier adults who paid more work-related taxes and relied less on welfare. 

— Read on www.aeaweb.org/research/charts/childhood-insurance-medicaid-adult-health

How Sickle Cell Trait in Black People Can Give the Police Cover – The New York Times

Sickle cell trait has been cited in dozens of police custody deaths ruled accidental or natural, even though the condition is benign on its own, a Times investigation found.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/us/african-americans-sickle-cell-police.html

Duckworth Calls for Closer Ties to Taiwan, More U.S. Vaccine Diplomacy – USNI News

The Taiwan Strait is a key route of trade and is as important as the Malacca Strait, between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, for the free flow of commerce in the Indo-Pacific, a key member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said on Tuesday.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, (D-Ill.) said Indo-Pacific nations view the U.S. Navy’s strait transits through the Taiwan Strait and through disputed territory in the South China Sea as welcomed.

“Just being a presence in the region is needed” when the Chinese are using its fishing fleet to assert extra-territorial claims, she said.
— Read on news.usni.org/2021/08/10/duckworth-calls-for-closer-ties-to-taiwan-more-u-s-vaccine-diplomacy

The Big Money Behind the Big Lie | The New Yorker

Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.
— Read on www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie

Trump Pressed Justice Dept. to Declare Election Results Corrupt, Notes Show – The New York Times

“Leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, the former president is said to have told top law enforcement officials.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/us/politics/trump-justice-department-election.html

Reconceptualizing Lithuania’s Importance for U.S. Foreign Policy – Foreign Policy Research Institute

This report is part of FPRI’s collaboration with Eastern Europe Studies Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania and can also be viewed here
— Read on www.fpri.org/article/2021/07/reconceptualizing-lithuanias-importance-for-u-s-foreign-policy/

This sedition is brought to you by… – CREW | Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

Corporations and industry groups are filling the coffers of political committees tied to the so-called Sedition Caucus — creating one of the biggest obstacles to holding these members accountable for their actions. It’s time to call them out.
— Read on www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/this-sedition-is-brought-to-you-by/