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President Biden came to CapitolHill on the 404th day of his presidency, during perhaps the most pivotal moment of his short tenure to deliver the State of the Union address.

According to aWashington Post-ABC News poll, Bidens presidential approval rating is at a new low, with 37 percent saying they approve of the job he is doing and 55 percent saying they disapprove.Inflation is at a four-decade zenith and shows few signs of receding. Bidens appointments to the Federal Reserve are wedged behind an increasingly obdurate Republicanblockade. The COVID pandemic finally seems to be easing but faces a public rightlyskepticalthe virus is gone indefinitely and there is a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.

If his approval rating were above 40 percent this would have been a typical State of the Union address, but it was not. In many respects, the nation and the world are balancing on a tightrope.

On almost every issue raised,Biden took a position that puts him in stark contrast with his party, especially the more progressive wing of the party. With 250 daysuntil the midterm elections,when voters will render judgment on Democrats control of Washington,the State of the Union,in my estimation did not move the needle. And the American people who are lukewarm about his presidency and unsure of how we might intervene in the Ukrainian crisis remain unmotivated or feel deflated.

So, who among the base, or generally, did this State of the Union address excite?

The president spent more time discussing the war in Ukraine than the war against voting rights at home. He also discussed strained engagements between some communities, especially communities of color, and law enforcement. He proclaimed, The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police, before ad-libbing: Fund them. Fund them.In that same moment, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-Iowa) in her Republican response accused Democrats of wanting to defund the police.

This example of dog-whistle politics hit against some of the presidents most critical base young, progressive and African American voters. This is an apparent snub of the leftist wing of the party. The unfortunate political reality is that George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John LewisJohn LewisBiden's SOTU affirms what we already know: His progressive agenda is over The US can no longer ignore Tunisia's fight for democracy Harris to travel to Selma for 'Bloody Sunday' anniversary MORE Voting Rights Act are dead.

Additionally, Biden did notmention Build Back Better by name his chief legislative agenda, though he mentioned critical elements of the plan. For a while now, its been pretty clear that the signature package is dormant in Congress particularly as we turn to an election year in which passing legislation is much more difficult. However, he did mention one signature Democratic agenda:the Child Tax Credit.He saidhe hoped to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and extend the credit, which saw monthly payments expire in December. Unfortunately, there is no plan to revive them.

Also, his Test to Treat program for immunocompromised individuals and access to therapeutics might be met with resistance as new COVID-19 guidelines recommend most Americans go unmasked, harkening back to last summer before the emergence of the delta variant.

Bidens State of the Union speech was light on genuinely divisive issues. Towards the end, he briefly mentioned abortion, immigration reform, transgender rights and climate change. And at plenty of points in the speech, he seemed to be trying to speak to issues dear to Republicans and perhaps even disaffected Democrats.

Stylistically, he spokeover the applause, seeming to rush through the speech without pause to allow for more extended ovation and for critical points to have their moments. It felt swifteven with his mention of the historic appointment of Judge Ketanji Brown JacksonKetanji Brown JacksonBiden's SOTU affirms what we already know: His progressive agenda is over Sen. Lujn returns to Senate after stroke Collins to meet with Biden's Supreme Court nominee Tuesday MORE, the first Black woman appointed to the Supreme Court. There was no recognition of the landmark diversity in the judiciary and he quickly pivoted to immigration, where he failed to lay out a comprehensive plan for reform.

All things considered, President Biden affirmed what we already know he is the epitome of moderation consistently appealing to the political attitudes of right-of-center Americans and small C conservatives who dont support him despite his efforts.

Furthermore, his unity agenda, which supports needed initiatives for issues such as opioids, cancer research, mental health and veterans care, is more of the same as what we have heard previously. No innovation, no big legislative agenda, no exceptionally comforting and enduring vision for the country. Democratsneed a winning strategy; President Biden has yet to exercise his bully pulpit in full support of this strategy.

Biden concluded: Fellow Americans: Look, we cant change how divided weve been ... but we can change how to move forward on COVID-19 and other issues that we must face together. Regrettably, the president did not provide a framework for change moving forward.

He enthusiastically concluded, Go get em.And I am afraid that is precisely what the Republican Party will do deliver a shellacking to the Democrats in November.

Quardricos Bernard Driskell is an adjunct professor of legislative politics atThe George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management.Follow him on Twitter @q_driskell4

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Biden's SOTU affirms what we already know: His progressive agenda is over | TheHill - The Hill

The Wikimedia Foundation has issued a statement supporting Russian Wikipedia volunteers after a censorship demand from internet regulators. On Tuesday, tech and communications regulator Roskomnadzor threatened to block Wikipedia over the Russian-language page covering Russias invasion of Ukraine, claiming it contained false messages about war casualties and the effects of economic sanctions, among other things.

On March 1st 2022 the Wikimedia Foundation received a Russian government demand to remove content related to the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine posted by volunteer contributors to Russian Wikipedia, reads the statement sent to The Verge via email. As ever, Wikipedia is an important source of reliable, factual information in this crisis. In recognition of this important role, we will not back down in the face of efforts to censor and intimidate members of our movement. We stand by our mission to deliver free knowledge to the world.

The Roskomnadzor demand, which was posted in Russian Wikipedias Telegram channel, demands Wikimedia address user edits from a February 27th version of the article. As translated by Wikimedia Russia, it takes issue with information about numerous casualties among the military personnel of the Russian Federation, as well as the civilian population of Ukraine, including number of children, as well as the need to withdraw funds from accounts in banks of the Russian Federation in connection with the sanctions imposed by foreign states. (While the wars casualties remain difficult to estimate, the United Nations has confirmed hundreds of civilian deaths in Ukraine since the conflict began last week, including at least 13 children, and acknowledged that its numbers likely underestimate the real death toll.)

Wikimedia Russia called the claims fundamentally impossible to evaluate and urged the government not to block access to the article which would effectively require blocking access to all of Wikipedia. It also noted that the page is constantly changing thanks to the work of its numerous editors. All these people have very different views on what is happening, and they are all very careful to ensure that someone does not insert false information or misleading wording into the article, the group wrote.

As Input notes, Russian authorities have sent a number of complaints about Wikipedia pages in the past. The government outright blocked the site in 2015 over a cannabis-related article, but the blackout was short-lived. However, the current threat is part of a larger online crackdown around the invasion one thats seen Russia block Twitter and Facebook in an effort to control the narrative around the war. Tuesdays takedown request threatened censorship. Denying people access to reliable information, at a time of crisis, can have life-altering consequences, warned the Wikimedia statement.

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Wikimedia says it 'will not back down' after Russia threatens Wikipedia block - The Verge

Art House is gearing up for Womens History Month as it hosts its Art+Feminism Art Talk and Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon on Wednesday, March 8 at 11 a.m. EST via Zoom.

Art House wont be alone for this as several universities will be joining in. Among the participants are Hudson County Community College, Seton Hall University, Paul Robeson Galleries at Express Newark, Rutgers University - Newark, and The Feminist Art Project, a program of the Rutgers Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities.

The Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon began in 2020. Those attending will learn how to edit and create Wikipedia pages for artists that are women, gender diverse, or people of color. The workshops goal is to amplify the voices of artists and cultural workers who are underrepresented in digital resources and the arts.

Since 2014, over 18,000 people at more than 1,260 events around the world have participated in edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 84,000 articles on Wikipedia and its sister projects, according to a press release from Wikipedia.

We are proud to partner again on this important virtual event supporting the worldwide movement to amplify gender diverse artists through Wikipedia, said Art House Producing Director Courtney Little. This is an incredible opportunity for community members to learn from each other and to enrich Wikipedia to include more voices and perspectives.

The event will feature closed captions autogenerated by Zoom. To request ASL interpreters, please email info@arthouseproductions.org at least 72 hours before the event. Free registration is available at https://bit.Ly/3tE8bYq. All are invited to register and edit or create a Wikipedia page for an artist.

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Art House and universities to host Art + Feminism - NJ.com

Could a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil cause a hurricane in Texas? American meteorologist Edward Lorenz once asked this question to show that small intrusions into complex systems can have unexpected effects.

This phenomenon, known as the butterfly effect, also applies to the networks of nature, the interrelationships of which are rarely known. However, in many places people intervene without even losing thought of what they might call it.

Finnish biologists describe an interesting example of this in the current issue of the scientific journal to know. In their study, they showed how overfishing of capelin, a small school fish in the Barents Sea, causes the miniaturization of salmon that other fishermen pull from waters several kilometers away in the Finnish Tino River.

For their study, the team led by biologist Yann Czorlich of Finlands University of Turku evaluated data from 40 years of hunting and combined it with results from genetic analyzes of salmon. Biologists have found that there is a relationship between the size of the Capelin clan in the Barents Sea and the frequency of a particular genetic variant in the tino salmon genome, which makes the fish sexually mature earlier and become smaller. Whenever capelin populations collapsed due to overfishing which occurred several times during the study period this genetic variant accumulated in salmon.

According to the authors, this connection, surprising at first glance, has to do with the complex life cycle of salmon. Fish are born in the fresh waters of rivers and then migrate to the sea. They spend their childhood and adolescence there, so to speak. Once they are sexually mature, they migrate back to the river where they were born to lay eggs.

In the Barents Sea, capelin schools huge in good times are one of the main food sources for the young salmon that live there. If fishing fleets pull a lot of capelin from the sea, then predatory fish find little to eat. The deficiency appears to result in a change in their genome that causes the salmon to mature earlier and remain smaller. The study authors wrote in to know. Biologists also talk about evolution in rapid motion.

Charles Darwin, who established the theory of evolution more than 160 years ago in his book On the Origin of Species, still posits that evolution is a slow process. It must take thousands or even millions of years for new species to form through mutation and selection (macroevolution) or for existing species to change (microevolution).

In the Anthropocene that is, in the era formed by humans the species Homo sapiens changed their environment and thus the conditions of other animals and plants at a much faster rate than in the history of the Earth. In this large-scale involuntary experiment, animals and plants must change quickly in order to have a chance of survival.

It has long been known that humans, as a selection factor, can directly influence and accelerate the development of animals and plants. An example is the elephants in Mozambique that have lost their tusks because they make them unattractive to poachers and allow them to survive. For a similar reason, many large-horned sheep in the United States no longer have thick horns, but rather slim horns. Cod has become noticeably thinner and shorter in recent decades due to the infiltration of small specimens through the nets of fishing fleets.

The current study is one of the few understandable examples of how humans influence evolution not only directly, but also indirectly: salmon are shrinking because humans catch an entirely different fish in an entirely different place. Ironically, capelin in the Barents Sea is also widely fished to feed salmon in aquaculture.

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Evolution in time-lapse: overfishing in the seas, and smaller salmon - Wikipedia - Socialpost

Before each summer and winter Paralympics, Tony Naar and his small team of enthusiastic volunteers set themselves a challenge: to create a Wikipedia page for every Australian para-athlete competing at the Games. In the past decade, this group known as the Australian Paralympic history project have created over 1,000 articles for para-athletes past and present. For each one, however, they have faced an obstacle: Wikipedias notability policy, which requires articles to be notable, or worthy of notice.

The project began prior to the London 2012 Paralympics. At the time, they partnered with Wikimedia Australia, the local chapter of the global Wikimedia Foundation, to offer an incentive: the two volunteers who created and edited the most articles ahead of the Games would win a free trip to London. But one of the things we confronted was the notability requirement, says Naar, a semi-retired sports administrator who previously worked for Paralympics Australia. If youre an Olympic athlete, you automatically met those notability requirements just by being an Olympic athlete. Being a Paralympic athlete wasnt good enough you had to be a medallist or otherwise meet the notability requirements.

In other words, para-athletes who had qualified for the Paralympics did not automatically qualify for Wikipedia. That meant the people involved in the project had to be pretty creative, says Naar. They had to hunt down other sources to justify having the article about the athlete. For example, newspaper articles or radio or television interviews. It was a question of frantically hunting those down ahead of London.

Ultimately, they succeeded just prior to the 2012 Paralympics, every Australian Paralympian competing in London had their own Wikipedia page. Their hard work provided a valuable service; over the two weeks of the Games, they had almost two million page views. It opened a lot of eyes [within the Paralympics community] because it way exceeded any other numbers, says Naar. The ABC televised the Paralympics and it way exceeded their views; it way exceeded views on Paralympics Australias official website. It indicated that there was a lot of interest in finding out information and Wikipedia was a great source for that.

One might think that Wikipedias notability distinction between Olympic and Paralympic athletes was blatantly discriminatory and would have been swiftly changed after London 2012. Naar chuckles with resignation. God no, he says. It has been a battle that we have fought a few times and have lost every time. At the moment that notability requirement stands just being a Paralympian still doesnt qualify you.

Nonetheless, thanks to the teams creativity, they have managed to create or update Wikipedia articles for every Australian para-athlete competing at Sochi 2014, Rio 2016, PyeongChang 2018 and Tokyo 2020, plus historical entries for past Paralympians. By the end of 2021, the team had written 617,797 words across almost 1,100 articles. In total, these articles have received just shy of 20 million page views.

These Wikipedia entries are the most visible part of the Paralympic history projects tireless work. But it represents just the tip of the iceberg. The project began in 2010, when Naar, who had been with Paralympics Australia (then the Australian Paralympic Committee) for a decade in various leadership roles, became aware that Kevin Coombs OAM was unwell. Coombs, a wheelchair basketballer, is a hugely significant figure; he was the first Indigenous athlete to represent Australia at a Paralympic or Olympic Games, competing at five Paralympics and carrying the torch into the Sydney 2000 Paralympic opening ceremony.

Id been aware that Paralympics Australia and the Paralympic team were very innovative and forward looking, really in the moment, says Naar. But there wasnt a massive amount of understanding or recognition of where the movement had gone before; it was very much based on the present, without acknowledgement of the past.

A colleague expressed concern that Coombs was unwell (he is now 80) and suggested that they might interview the Paralympic legend. That was really the impetus to get the project off the ground, Naar says. He contacted the National Library of Australia and suggested they might expand their oral history project to include past Paralympians. Within weeks they had recorded an interview with Coombs. We just took it from there, he adds. Today, the National Library has over 50 oral history interviews with significant Paralympic figures.

The interview precipitated a moment of reflection at Paralympics Australia. We thought, well, how can we capture the history of the movement in Australia? says Naar. Whats the best way of going about that? Some wanted a book, but Naar was keen think bigger. Lots of organisations produce books, but you tend to produce a few hundred copies, you give away 50 and the other 250 copies sit in boxes for years until someone throws them out,.

Instead, Naar and Professor Keith Lyons at the University of Canberra approached Wikimedia Australia, who were immediately interested in the project. Blending digital and orthodox history, through academic, sporting and institutional partners, the Australian Paralympic history project was born. It is a unique digital history project which combines traditional history elements and manages, presents and preserves them digitally in a way that is relevant to how people seek and use information in the 21st century, says Naar. They are also working on a book, which will be published shortly.

In 2013, with the University of Queensland, the project received a grant of $250,000 from the Australian Research Council, in addition to funding from Paralympics Australia. The group have used the funding to engage researchers, conduct Wikipedia workshops, develop a 3,000-image strong photo library and create an interactive website. We wanted to make it as accessible as possible, Naar adds. If you wanted to find out about the history of the Paralympic movement in Australia, anyone, anywhere could find it.

The Tasmanian has been at the forefront of this work, initially as a Paralympic Australia employee and then contractor, together with an ad hoc group of about 60 volunteers (including Greg Blood, who creates the helpful Australia at the Paralympics summary pages each Games). While Paralympics Australias funding for the project ceased in May 2020 due to Covid-related cuts, Naar has continued on in an unpaid capacity coordinating volunteers and managing the wider project.

Despite the current lack of financial support, Naar hopes that the project will endure. He says it has helped fill major gaps in Paralympic history: when the project started, Paralympics Australia only had archive imagery dating back to 1996; the project has subsequently collected photos from Australias participation in the first Games, in 1960, and at every Paralympics since. They have also hosted reunions for early teams, including a 50th anniversary of the 1960 Paralympics. The fact that five decades later we could talk to the people who had been at the first Paralympic Games was very powerful, Naar says.

Asked why he continues to work 20 hours a week, unpaid, on this project, Naar underscores the importance of history. For me, its an ongoing acknowledgement of the people who made the movement what it is today. Its important for sporting organisations to have a history and recognise that history.

Current and former Paralympic athletes have expressed gratitude for the teams work preserving their historic achievements. Naar cites a recent example to underscore the importance of accurately preserving history. Last year in Tokyo, when Madison de Rozario won gold, the commentary team was saying that this was the first female Australian to win the Paralympic marathon, he says. They were not the only ones most news coverage led with this claim. Only, it was wrong.

In actual fact, Jan Randles won a gold medal in the first wheelchair marathon held in 1984, Naar says. (Embarrassingly, this author made the same error). The project has since collaborated with Randles to provide more information online. Jan got fairly upset by the whole thing and weve since worked with her to make sure that the [Wikipedia] article has been updated and is more comprehensive and her story is out there. It means a huge amount to her.

When Australias Winter Paralympians take to the slopes in Beijing this week, they can take heart knowing their achievements will be accurately recorded for future generations. And, despite Wikipedias discriminatory notability requirement, Naar and his colleagues will have found a way to ensure that every para-athlete has their own page even before the opening ceremony begins.

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Half a million words and 20m views: the project preserving Australias Paralympic history - The Guardian