#democratizing data

[goodoldbandit]

Building a Data-Driven Culture: Transforming Data into Actionable Insights.

Sanjay Kumar Mohindroo Sanjay Kumar Mohindroo. skm.stayingalive.in Discover how to cultivate a data-driven culture, turning raw data into actionable insights that fuel growth and innovation. #DataDriven #Leadership In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the ability to leverage data effectively has become a critical competitive advantage. Organizations that successfully build a…

[techinfotrends]

Discover how democratizing data can bridge the #talent gap in your organization. Gain insights into the strategies and tools needed to make data accessible to all, and unlock the potential for thriving business growth. Download the guide now. https://bit.ly/3Vy5oxs

[alwaysbewoke]

here is the sheet. it's an excel spreadsheet so it will download to your computer. this is really important for all the people who constantly say "democrats and republicans are the same." if they're not willing to do the work to either prove or disprove that notion, they're NOT someone ANYONE should be taking political advice from.

[my-midlife-crisis]

EAT THE RICH

[immortalsins]

uni results come out at 2pm today and my mother has decided it's the perfect day to head up a mountain

[qqueenofhades]

Going to cautiously posit that if they're moving toward calling Kentucky for Beshear (incumbent Democratic governor) in a blindingly red state Trump won by 30 points, in an off-year election, about 30 minutes after polls close statewide, that is a Good Sign.

[relaxedstyles]

[more-flotsam-and-jetsam]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box:

Even in a media environment where consumers have unlimited choices, a 60 Minutes interview is the coup de grace. A campaign would do almost anything to be featured. The highly-rated program comes on right after NFL football — making it the one thing on broadcast TV that still draws a mass audience. Donald Trump pulled out of the 60 Minutes interview, ceding the entire show to his opponent. In the campaign's final weeks, Trump also reportedly pulled out of interviews with CNBC and NBC News. He turned down an opportunity to participate in a prime-time CNN town hall. In fact, Trump didn’t do a single interview with a traditional news outlet in the campaign's final stretch. No national broadcast interviews, no sit-downs with local TV anchors or newspapers.

The winning candidate ignored the traditional media, focusing instead on partisan media outlets and politics-adjacent podcasts. While this change isn’t new, it seems clear that 2024 was a pivot point for the role of the legacy media in politics. Democratic communications strategies have evolved over the years — and the Harris campaign did some very innovative things. Nevertheless, our approach to communicating with voters continues to depend heavily on the legacy media. When we have something to say, we look for a cable or broadcast network to say it on. We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the morning tipsheets and which surrogates are booked on cable news. New York Times headlines can be a party-wide obsession. Do Democrats need to follow Trump’s lead and break up with the legacy media? The Right Wing media’s advantage was particularly decisive during this election. This is the first in a series of posts discussing how Trump outmessaged us in the 2024 election and what we can do in the future. 

A Changed Dynamic

For a long time, the political press was the most powerful force in politics. So powerful that they were known as the “Fourth Estate” with the capacity to make or break a campaign. The list of failed presidential candidates who were unable to win over the tastemakers in the media is long. One can credibly argue that unfair press coverage from the New York Times and others were a significant factor in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss.

The traditional media has been losing relevance for a while now. The death spiral of the political media is a much longer, more complicated story (I wrote a lot about it in my most recent book), but there have been a few dynamics driving this descent.  The first is the rapid pace of technological innovation. Newspapers were once the most powerful entities in media. A presidential campaign wanted nothing more than a great picture on the front page of the Des Moines Register, Philadelphia Inquirer, or Detroit Free Press. Most local papers are shells of themselves — simply carrion for private equity to drain the last few cents before closing up shop. While the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are thriving, the Washington Post is bleeding money and full of controversy, and USA Today barely registers (I had to Google if it was still published). Cable and broadcast viewership is down as more consumers cut the cord or turn to social media for news. Legacy media is simply reaching fewer people. Second, the media reaches people who are less likely to believe what they read/see/hear. 

[...] A Data for Progress poll found that Kamala Harris won voters who consumed “a great deal” and “a lot” of news but lost the voters who consumed no news by a whopping 19 points.

The New New Media

The biggest media events of the 2024 campaign were not on 60 Minutes or Meet the Press. They didn’t involve the New York Times or any of the major cable channels. They were interviews with podcasters Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper. The media titans are influencers with large followings and parasocial relationships with their audiences. Many voters no longer trust media institutions, but instead trust folks with whom they often spend hours every week. A Pew Knight study found that one-in-five Americans – 37% of adults under 30 – regularly get their news from social media influencers. Trump and the Republicans have better understood this shift than Democrats. At the end of the campaign, nearly all of Trump’s media interactions were with Right-leaning podcasters commanding massive social media followings. During Trump’s victory speech, UFC boss Dana White came on stage and specifically thanked Adin Ross, the NELK Boys, Theo Von, and the folks from Barstool Sports. The GOP has actively tried to support their influencers with interviews and attention. While Kamala Harris did appear on Cooper’s wildly popular Call Her Daddy podcast, most Democrats kept podcasters and news influencers at arms length.

Dan Pfeiffer’s latest Message Box Substack post shows that the Democratic Party’s overreliance on legacy media at the expense of nontraditional media came back to bite them, and that Dems should focus more on nontraditional media outlets in addition to the legacy MSM.

[artistsonthelam]

(my Threads post)

[h8everything]

out of touch republican parent vs millennial child

[jcmarchi]

Researchers study differences in attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines between women and men in Africa

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/researchers-study-differences-in-attitudes-toward-covid-19-vaccines-between-women-and-men-in-africa/

Researchers study differences in attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines between women and men in Africa

While many studies over the past several years have examined people’s access to and attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines, few studies in sub-Saharan Africa have looked at whether there were differences in vaccination rates and intention between men and women. In a new study appearing in the journal Frontiers in Global Women’s Health, researchers found that while women and men self-reported similar Covid-19 vaccination rates in 2022, unvaccinated men expressed more intention to get vaccinated than unvaccinated women.

Women tend to have better health-seeking behaviors than men overall. However, most studies relating to Covid-19 vaccination have found that intention has been lower among women. “We wondered whether this would hold true at the uptake level,” says Rawlance Ndejjo, a leader of the new study and an assistant lecturer in the Department of Disease Control and Environmental Health at Makerere University.

The comparable vaccination rates between men and women in the study is “a good thing to see,” adds Lula Chen, research director at MIT Governance Lab (GOV/LAB) and a co-author of the new study. “There wasn’t anything gendered about how [the vaccine] was being advertised or who was actually getting access to it.”

Women’s lower intention to vaccinate seemed to be driven by concerns about vaccine safety, suggesting that providing factual information about vaccine safety from trusted sources, like the Ministry of Health, could increase uptake.

The work is a collaboration between scholars from the MIT GOV/LAB, Makerere University’s School of Public Health in Uganda, University of Kinshasa’s School of Public Health in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), University of Ibadan’s College of Medicine in Nigeria, and Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal. 

Studying vaccine availability and uptake in sub-Saharan Africa

The authors’ collaboration began in 2021 with research into Covid-19 vaccination rates, people’s willingness to get vaccinated, and how people’s trust in different authorities shaped attitudes toward vaccines in Uganda, the DRC, Senegal, and Nigeria. A survey in Uganda found that people who received information about Covid-19 from health workers were more likely to be vaccinated, stressing the important role people who work in the health-care system can play in vaccination efforts.

Work from other scientists has found that women were less likely to accept Covid-19 vaccines than men, and that in low- and middle-income countries, women also may be less likely to get vaccinated against Covid-19 and less likely to intend to get vaccinated, possibly due to factors including lower levels of education, work obligations, and domestic care obligations.

Previous studies in sub-Saharan Africa that focused on differences between men and women with intention and willingness to vaccinate were inconclusive, Ndejjo says. “You would hardly find actual studies on uptake of the vaccines,” he adds. For the new paper, the researchers aimed to dig into uptake.

People who trust the government and health officials were more likely to get vaccinated

The researchers relied on phone survey data collected from adults in the four countries between March and July 2022. The surveys asked people about whether they’d been vaccinated and whether those who were unvaccinated intended to get vaccinated, as well as their attitudes toward Covid-19, their trust in different authorities, demographic information, and more.

Overall, 48.5 percent of men said they had been vaccinated, compared to 47.9 percent of women. Trust in authorities seemed to play a role in people’s decision to vaccinate — receiving information from health workers about Covid-19 and higher trust in the Ministry of Health were both correlated with getting vaccinated for men, whereas higher trust in the government was correlated with vaccine uptake in women.

Lower interest in vaccines among women seemed related to safety concerns

A smaller percentage of unvaccinated women (54 percent) said they intended to get vaccinated, compared to 63.4 percent of men. More unvaccinated women said they had concerns about the vaccine’s safety than unvaccinated men, which could be driving their lower intention.

The researchers also found that unvaccinated women and men over 40 had similar levels of intention to get vaccinated — lower intention in women under 40 may have driven the difference between men and women. Younger women could have concerns about vaccines related to pregnancy, Chen says. If this is the case, the research suggests that officials need to provide additional reassurance to pregnant people about vaccine safety, she adds.

Trust in authorities also contributed to people’s intention to vaccinate. Trust in the Ministry of Health was tied to higher intention to vaccinate for both men and women. Men with more trust in the World Health Organization were also more likely to intend to vaccinate.

“There’s a need to deal with a lot of the myths and misconceptions that exist,” Ndejjo says, as well as ensure that people’s concerns related to vaccine safety and effectiveness are addressed. Officials need “to work with trusted sources of information to bridge some of the gaps that we observe,” he adds. People need to be supported in their decision-making so they can make the best decisions for their health.

“This research highlights linkages between citizen trust in government, their willingness to get vaccines, and, importantly, the differences between men and women on this issue — differences that policymakers will need to understand in order to design more targeted, gender-specific public health interventions,” says study co-author Lily L. Tsai, who is MIT GOV/LAB’s director and founder and the Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT.

This project was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

[deadpresidents]

Carter has passed Garner! He now holds ALL the records for anyone who has ever been President or VP! Only Alf Landon's still stands and he was never President!

Yes, you are correct! Jimmy Carter has now passed John Nance Garner on the list of longest-living Presidents or Vice Presidents (here was that list at the beginning of September). And we are 10 days away from President Carter becoming the first President or Vice President to ever celebrate their 99th birthday. Not bad for a guy who has been in hospice care since February.

And, yes, Alf Landon is the longest-living major party nominee for President or Vice President. Landon was the 1936 Republican Presidential nominee and lost the general election to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Landon was 100 years, 33 days old when he died in 1987. Think about that for a second: Alf Landon was the Republican Presidential nominee when FDR ran for his second term as President, and Landon died when Ronald Reagan had a little over a year left in his Presidency!

BUT, it's worth nothing that while Alf Landon is undoubtedly the longest-living Presidential or Vice Presidential nominee by a major party, he is NOT the longest-living person to ever win Electoral votes as President or Vice President.

In 1948, many Southern Democrats opposed to support for civil rights in the party's platform at the Democratic National Convention bolted from the party and formed the States' Rights or "Dixiecrat" party to run against incumbent Democratic President Harry S. Truman and Republican nominee Thomas Dewey. The Dixiecrats nominated South Carolina Governor (and future longtime Senator) Strom Thurmond as their Presidential nominee. Despite not being a major party nominee, Thurmond and the Dixiecrats, relying on voters in former Confederate strongholds in the South, performed better in the general election than just about any third-party Presidential candidate of the 20th Century.

Thurmond and the Dixiecrats won 4 states and 39 Electoral votes in 1948. In 1936, Republican nominee Alf Landon won two states and just 8 Electoral votes. So Thurmond's racist, third-party challenge performed far better than the GOP nominee had done twelve years earlier.

So, unfortunately, while we're talking about longest-living President or Vice Presidential nominees, we have to throw Strom Thurmond in the conversation considering the fact that he won far more Electoral votes in 1948 than Alf Landon did in 1936. And Thurmond lived longer, as well. Thurmond was 100 years, 203 days old when he died in 2003 -- he lived 170 days longer than Alf Landon did.

Thurmond is also almost certainly the oldest person to ever be one of the top officials in the Presidential line of succession. As I mentioned, Thurmond eventually served in the U.S. Senate from South Carolina -- a seat that he held from 1954-2003 (except for a period of about 7 months in 1956) -- where he eventually became the first (and only, so far) person to serve in Congress after their 100th birthday. Due to his lengthy tenure in office, Thurmond was president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate for several years when his party was in control of the Senate.

As president pro tem, Thurmond was third in the Presidential line of succession, behind the Vice President and Speaker of the House. This meant that, Thurmond was third in the line of succession well after turning 98 years old. In June 2001, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords announced that he would begin caucusing with the Democrats in the Senate, which gave the Democrats a narrow majority and control in the Senate, However, if Jeffords had not made that decision when he did, Strom Thurmond would have been president pro tempore on September 11, 2001. That means a nearly 99-year-old man would have been third in the Presidential succession at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

[dhaaruni]

PSA: If I end up applying for this job I'm looking at, I'm going to be scrubbing this entire blog (again)

[o-the-mts]

[newfangled-vady]

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