The choice between "dense urban core" and "suburb" is distinctly American. Especially in Europe, city (in the sense of "not suburb or rural" != center of a large (1M+) population.
In America, any region with a population the order of 100k or less is basically a shopping area surrounded by suburbs. The same is not true in Europe.
In Europe, you can definitely find walkable, breathable, friendly cities while still living in an area that is safer than (and has a smaller population than) the typical Chicago suburban area.
I don't think it's a distinctly American term. The distinction between the "city" and "suburbs" or "commuter belt" is pretty common in Europe too, at least in cities that actually have such a pattern, especially with a radial commuter-rail network and clearly defined commercial center. For example I don't think anybody that lives in Ishøj or Brøndby is under the impression that they live in an independent "city"; they live in a suburb of Copenhagen, whose main virtue is that it's cheaper than Copenhagen but has good access via the S-train.
A large proportion of the commuter belt of London, Paris, Marseilles, Lyon, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Brussels, Rome, etc. are places like that, some nicer and some more depressing, but definitely suburbs that exist mainly to house people who commute in to the city.
I disagree. Typical Chicago suburban area is safer than Europe. If you exclude homicides, most of which happen on the south side of Chicago, Europe has a lot more crime
Indeed; in Europe, you can find the same reproduced at the village and hamlet level, too.
It's a density issue, at heart. Any US "city" (if it should be called that) of 100K-500K occupies 10x-20x the surface area that it would in most parts of the world, removing much of the cohesion that leads us to call places cities or towns in the first place.
I think you're going to get in trouble with generalizations like "any US city", or even "any US city of 100k-500k". Can you be more specific about the faux-cities you're referring to, rather than nerd-baiting me to come up with a list of cities that defy your criteria?
The one that sprang immediately to mind was Ann Arbor, Michigan, because I used to live there. But I can come up with more, if you like.
Your argument is that mid-sized US cities with densities comparable to European cities are rare, and that this causes pathology. That sounds intuitively defensible, because America definitely has more space to play with for its cities than Europe. But let's try to be specific.
What's a model European city, so we can compare its density to some set of American cities?
I spent my middle and high school years in Athens, GA. It would not ordinarily be seen as a target for sprawl-bashing, given its ostensibly compact nature. And it's true, the downtown and campus are fused into something fairly livable.
However, as usual, 90% of the population doesn't live in that tiny core, but instead in the same kind of low-density layout one can find anywhere in America. While I haven't been to Ann Arbor since grade six or so, my recollection is that it's similar; wonderful UMich campus, nice downtown, but most of the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area? Same old automobile folk traditions. Am I misremembering?
Re: comparing density --
Density is certainly not the only variable. In my article, I made the point about how proximity/adjacency != walking accessibility. That seems relevant, too. It's probably quite possible to build a place with a decently high density where a car is still required to go anywhere, or a relatively low-density but profoundly pedestrian-friendly hamlet.
I know Athens solely from REM and Elephant 6 music. I've never been there.
Saline and Ypsi are suburbs of Ann Arbor.
Ann Arbor itself is mostly walkable, tree-lined, mixed-use, and connected by public transportation.
More than 90% of the population of Ann Arbor lives in Ann Arbor and not Ypsi or Saline. :)
What are the rest of the variables? I'd like to drive to specificity. If there's a set of US midsized cities that defies your characterizations, maybe there's something interesting that ties them together.
I'm certainly not going to deny that there are crappy cities!
I'm not sure I've ever seen a midsized US city that defies my characterisations. I've seen plenty of cases where something progressive-sounding got built within them, but it was an island, unconnected and irrelevant. One mixed-use-sounding shopping strip with attached condos does not sprawl unmake.
Of those, I've only been to Minneapolis, but I can say with complete certainty that it, too, is a suburban wasteland. Yes, it's got a downtown that's clearly seeing some promise, as is true of numerous cities (even the very same Atlanta), but all in all, it's almost entirely a driving city.
The train from Ann Arbor to Chicago? The nearest major metro to Ann Arbor is Detroit, not Chicago. Utrecht is just 30 miles away from Amsterdam. A2 is 250 miles from Chicago.
Utrecht is about as far from Amsterdam as Orland Park is from Chicago. Train connectivity between Orland and Chicago: also pretty frequent and reliable.
It's a little unfair to compare that particular run to the entire state of Michigan, which would be the 20th largest country in Europe if admitted to the EU, just behind Iceland and ahead of Hungary.
That's fair, I wasn't in NL long enough to really get a sense for distance. Took the train to Amsterdam once.
(we're both making some edits)
I think the higher density is part of why Europe seems to have more nice cities though. I actually kind of joked about that while I was there, that the publicly owned land in Michigan is roughly the size of the Netherlands (the national and state forests).
With high density, if you "need" cityscape you can just build a rail to where it makes sense to have the city.
The fact that burbs are the most desirable places to live in STL is pretty much the reason I'll never move back. It's an incredibly depressing metro area.
There's a lot of city-living worship here. But (as would certainly be the case with myself) it's mostly for a very tiny number of mostly coastal cities.
The attack I linked to originates from the malicious site and links to the trusted site (the reverse of the attack in this post). There is nothing a site can do to prevent this since there is no way for a linked to site to prevent the linking site from getting a window reference to it. So, imagine a scenario like this:
* trusted site implements the guidance here and links to malicious site.
* The malicious site, detecting that they can't get a reference to "window.opener" immediately opens a new tab back to the trusted site (maybe to the login page if the site has any logout CSRF issues).
* The user is slightly confused, but they were just on the trusted site, so it doesn't feel too strange.
* If the user is super savvy, the look up at the URL bar and are assured that they actually are back in the trusted site (possibly staring at a login prompt).
* the attacker has a reference to the window they opened back to the trusted site. They set a timer for a couple seconds (like the attack I referenced above). After a few seconds they change the trusted site to load a malicious site and/or malicious data URL.
* user "logs in to the trusted site" and gives up their creds.
Re: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/switch/, couldn't browsers simply do a better job of showing the address when window.location.href is 'data:text/html;-peak.us/banking_interface/' or any other data URL?
Re: malicious sites linking back to a parent that opened the, could browsers not also disable cross-origin .opener?
Sure...but that is another thing that needs to be added to all browsers; it begins to feel like a game of whack-a-mole. In the end, browsers rely on an admittedly fragile premise...the only thing that guarantees your current location is a persistent awareness of what domain you are on. Most of the time that works for savvy users (normal users have no fighting chance/nor should they be expected to have to do this). But, these various edge cases break the reasonable expectation that the domain I'm on will stay the domain I'm on until I explicitly do something.
In my opinion, the better place for a more holistic fix to this is within Conntent Security Policy. That could, theoretically, address all attacks that somehow obtain a window ref. The CSP policy could say "window-ref: 'none'". That would be a declarative policy that the browser could enforce in any situation where a window ref might be available.
Another benefit of implementing it in CSP is that you could retroactively fix existing sites without having to go back and fix up potentially thousands of links that didn't set the attribute mentioned in this article.
Of course it's whack a mole. Moat things in infosec are, that doesn't mean browsers shouldn't ship with secure defaults or present trustworthy info in the address bar.
This game off whack-a-mole feels different. Unlike the typical "memory corruption of the week", this kind of stuff isn't fixed by a simple browser update and inherited "for free" by all sites. And, this kind of fix doesn't enable a browser to ship with a secure default. Instead, it adds a new thing you have to opt into and retroactively add to all existing links on your site. That is a fair bit of work, and adding more and more of those kinds of features for nominal gain is a tough sell. That is a much more painful game of whack-a-mole and isn't an approach that scales well. The CSP solution at least has a potentially simpler scaling solution to the problem.
Unless we are talking about something terribly dire (arbitrary code execution) browser vendors are super unlikely to change behavior that has existed, and potentially relied upon, for many years. The bar for changing existing behavior is extremely high and this kind of attack won't come anywhere near meeting it. So, the only realistic solution is something that a site opts into (or out of depending on your perspective). CSP would at least let the site that is a potential victim protect itself. And, if there was a good reason to let a partner site have window ref (I could imagine something related to payment providers and modal pop up payment flows), they could opt in to that. It would look something like.
window-ref 'self' PayPal.com
Something like that would let the site reference their own windows as well as grant access to a "trusted partner" like PayPal.
Browser vendors do 'phase out' old behavior and phase in new ones. I understand "don't break the web", but as someone else famously replied, "the web is a self healing mechanism". Look at what browsers have done re: forms submitted over HTTP.
A maintained site that relies on window.opener should, after a 24 month period of angry console warnings saying a change needs to be made, actually make that change.
Out of curiosity, have you spent time in academia?
> The rationale behind publishing in long-form journal articles is not really valid in our century.
No, it's perfectly valid. Some ideas can't be expressed in short form. A 5-page long proof requires a 10-20 page article to properly motivate and provide context/explanation. An evolutionary or piece-by-piece doesn't make any sense; you'll end up with fragmented dead ends. Waste of everyone's time.
> and findings are typically summarized in their 3-4 figures anyway
I'm not really sure which fields you're referring to, but I assure you that you're over-generalizing. This isn't even remotely true even for very empirical sciences.
> There are proposals for new approaches
Usually these are appropriate only for a single subdomain or methodology and only provide one particular and extremely opinionated view on the results. Such as the proposal in the article you posted.
The overhead isn't worth it and there's a huge risk the relevant field(s) move quickly enough that the presentation method becomes obsolete before it becomes useful.
> It should be possible for each finding to cite other findings it relied on
...I don't know what to say to this...
> thus creating a graph of influence/significance
Yeah, we have this. It's called bibliometrics. UNIVERSALLY HATED by anyone who's not a bean counter. Good people ignore them. Bad people optimize for the metrics and it becomes a stupid game that has nothing to do with the thing you're trying to measure.
> The current situation with citations often involves friends citing friends , so i don't consider it reliable
This is just one reason among many that bibliometrics (a.k.a. any necessarily poor attempt at "a graph of influence/significance") are a poor mechanism by which to judge science...
> It should also include open questions , thus giving research directions.
In many fields literally every paper includes this. In most it's rather obvious to anyone who comprehends the paper what the next steps are.
And also all the other resources the university library offers. Especially in summer months, uni libraries are amazing and massively under-used resources. Working/learning is a public library is usually a drag, but uni libraries are awesome.
I used to live a couple blocks from a uni library, and I practically lived there. In the summers I drove straight there from work, got lost in the stacks learning about random things, and only left when it closed.
Fortunately that library was completely free to the public, but if it weren't I would have happily paid $100/mo during the summer months for access (Probably saved that much just in utilities anyways.)
Teen pregnancy rates will be higher than teen birth rates in jurisdictions that are not hostile to abortion. But teen birth rate is probably a far easier statistic to gather.
As of this post, three of the 20 comments on this story conjecture that obesity plays some role, and a full half of the comments are on subthreads discussing this hypothesis.
Interesting because I've never heard this hypothesis before and other online discussion of this article does not mention obesity.
It's also a bad hypothesis because the article is talking about changes that occurred over the last 10 years, and childhood obesity rates (including teenagers) have stabilized over the last 10 years.
It seems a little silly to me. Especially because when we talk about obesity, most people visualize morbid obesity. There are plenty of textbook definition "obese" people who can still attract mates.
The library at the university I attended as an undergraduate threw out (3 or 4?) volumes of TAOCP but kept "the magna guide to SQL" or some crap like this.
Their justification was that TAOCP had never been checked out. Which is funny because the year prior when I tried to check out a volume, they told me it was a reference book and could not be checked out.
I'm still completely confused about how that decisions was actually made, and why the books weren't given away or sold.
The manga guide to Calculus is a great book. It helps me reason on a topic that is hard for me to grasp. Someone must think SQL is a difficult topic too.
TACOP is extremely dense and put me to sleep every time I tried to read it. I recently donated my copy of 0-4 to my work library, where nobody was interested in reading it.
The fact that we both have opposite views of your example books shows that this is a difficult process for librarians.
I worked through Chapter 1 back in college, now over a decade ago, with a professor of mine one summer. It was a great introduction (and led us to Concrete Mathematics) for me to a lot of topics regarding algorithmic thinking and discrete mathematics.
That said, I never worked through the remaining chapters of the series, and likely never will. It's a reference book. Read the sections as they pertain to you. For instance, TAOCP was my introduction to sorting networks. This led to direct, measurable, improvements in a few embedded programs (where consistent, deterministic behavior, and optimal behavior, were strongly desired).
I mean, few people ever read a dictionary. I still have one on my desk at home and at the office. This isn't substantially different (though I do recommend skimming it so you are aware of what resources it contains for later reference).
In America, any region with a population the order of 100k or less is basically a shopping area surrounded by suburbs. The same is not true in Europe.
In Europe, you can definitely find walkable, breathable, friendly cities while still living in an area that is safer than (and has a smaller population than) the typical Chicago suburban area.