Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • South African Women Are Reclaiming Their Voices in the Media

    Quote This Woman+ (QW+) is a database of women experts – as well as other people systematically ignored or misconstrued by mainstream media narratives. QW+ provides an easy way for journalists and news producers to find a vetted expert to speak with. Founders relied on referrals to build the database, with each newly added expert asked to refer at least five other experts in the field. The platform launched right before South Africa’s 2019 election with 40 experts in 25 categories and now has 513 experts across 49 categories and a newsletter subscription list of about a thousand journalists.

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  • Stop Viewing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as a Monolith

    Data disaggregation allowed the CDC to quickly recognize the severe impact of Coronavirus on the Marshallese community in Arkansas. This was only possible due to a previous precedent of collecting health data from them specifically. Services to mitigate the spread and its effects were quickly put into place.

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  • Hey Siri, Learn to Speak Kinyarwanda

    Common Voice is an open-source initiative to capture more languages for voice-recognition software. Users “donate” their voices by recording themselves reading text out loud. They can also validate the accuracy of already donated voices. The platform has over 9,000 hours of voice data for 90 languages contributed by more than 166,000 people. The group runs creative campaigns to encourage native speakers to contribute, like “Digital Umuganda” in Rwanda, which is a play on a national holiday when people engage in community service. The campaign gathered over 1,700 hours of Kinyarwanda language from 840 people.

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  • A New Project Is Bringing the Gay ‘Green Book' Online

    In 1965 a traveling salesman published a series of travel guides with gay or gay-friendly businesses across the U.S. that became survival guides for the LGBTQ community. “Mapping the Gay Guides” has digitized those collections, allowing users to explore the original descriptions and added historical content written by graduate students. Reasons for why locations appear and disappear from year-to-year are provided, which sometimes intersect with LGBTQ hate crimes. A $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will allow them to continue to preserve and make the forgotten history accessible.

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  • Chocpocalypse Now! Quarantine and the Future of Food

    Off the coast of Australia, the energy company Chevron is experimenting with new quarantine management techniques to ensure that any plants and pests don’t hitchhike to new places, which can devastate the global food economy. They’ve redesigned shipping containers to make it harder for insects to tag along and they’ve created a video game to train workers on how to be better at finding these pests in their inspections. Some creatures and plants can slip through the process, but these tools have been successful and could be used in other ways.

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  • Local Platforms for Online Food Delivery Are Eating the Big Guys' Lunch

    Locally owned restaurant delivery platforms charge lower commissions than national giants like GrubHub, allow customers to order food on smart-phone apps, and have found ways to be profitable while also keeping money in local economies. While platforms differ by locale, cooperative models are increasingly popular. For example, Delivery Co-op in Lexington, KY provides customers with unlimited deliveries for a monthly fee, charges participating restaurants a flat monthly fee, and pays drivers a base salary plus tips, with benefits kicking after three months of full-time work and profit-sharing after one year.

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  • The 40-Year-Old System: How an upgrade could help the VEC solve payment problems

    If Virginia taxpayers who lost their jobs in the pandemic want to understand why their unemployment insurance payments lagged for months and why they couldn't get the Virginia Employment Commission on the phone, they could look to South Carolina. In 2017 that state took advantage of a grant to upgrade its computer systems. It was able to process payments much more quickly, needed many fewer call-center staff, and could help South Carolinians take advantage of enhanced pandemic benefits much sooner. Virginia has struggled to upgrade is decades-old systems, which were overwhelmed with calls and claims.

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  • Both lost jobs. She got paid. He waits. Where they live may be the reason why.

    Four years before the pandemic caused unemployment compensation claims to spike, South Carolina took advantage of a federal grant to modernize its claims processing systems. That upgrade saved thousands of hours of time once claims rose sharply, which meant that people making legitimate claims got paid relatively quickly. That stands in contrast with the Virginia Employment Commission's huge backlog, which must be run through a decades-old system. The state was finally upgrading its systems when the pandemic put that work on hold, leaving some laid-off people in financial limbo for several months.

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  • Food waste is heating up the planet. Is dumpster-diving by app a solution?

    The app Too Good to Go helps restaurants and other shops prevent food waste by selling their extra food to people for a cheaper price. So far, more than 700,000 people in the United States have downloaded the app and the company estimates that, on average, each meal sold halts 2.2 pounds of food from ending up in the garbage, which ends up reducing carbon emissions. There are challenges to widespread implementation, but the app has launched in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle.

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  • The Clubhouse Room Where Israelis and Palestinians Are Actually Talking

    “Meet Palestinians and Israelis” is an online chat room on the Clubhouse app that encourages honest and vulnerable conversations that aim to humanize one another. Eighteen moderators, mostly young Israelis and Palestinians, ensure that the audio-only conversations don’t relitigate history or compare suffering, but instead share personal stories and ask questions to understand different perspectives. The moderators work in shifts to maintain the discussions and answer questions, with the non-Palestinian and non-Israeli moderators acting as third-party neutrals, settling down conversations when needed.

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