| Web | https://paul.kishimoto.name |
| Pronouns | he/him |
| Location | Vienna, AT |
| 🖼️ | https://pxlfd.ca/@paulnatsuo |
When I need to use “Alice and Bob” (https://en-wp.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob) in technical writing, I'll swap in Ahmed, Arjun, or Aki, make the third character Chen, etc.
What would be great to have: a standard list, list of lists, or generator that included a gender-balanced and globally representative set of names.
🙏🏽🙏🏽 if anyone can point to existing work along these lines.
There is now a firmly documented pattern of Israel ordering civilians in Gaza to evacuate into "safe" zones, then directly bombarding those same zones in the following days.
This is a full-on pattern of ethnic cleansing, and methodically executed genocide.
Also, just to be clear: some *other* #TRB committees came through the 'reorg' with no name change.
People who were Members etc. of *those* committees now get to make a choice:
Do they—like TRB staff, but for zero pay—donate their future time and energy to an organization that's signaled such priorities and lobotomized itself to further a right-wing agenda?
Or do they help create & expand spaces where they can have meaningful academic freedom, e.g. to say radical words like "climate change"?
Although it's going to slow work in the short run (surely one of the intended effects), I think this gives transport and mobility researchers a rare chance to build new community processes.
If we look to learn and emulate best practices from people in other research domains, these can be fair, inclusive, just, rigorous, and all the things that the #TRB never allowed its Annual Meeting and other activities to be, despite persistent requests from volunteers.
The e-mail itself is of that particular, dense variety of bullshit that results from trying to put a reasonable veneer on indefensible acts.
Sadly, like many others in the U.S. government, National Academies/#TRB staff have opted to *actively work* to excrete and send this, when they could have refused/resigned on principle.
Also sad is that this is not a sudden change brought on by the new US administration; rather it's on a continuum with how researchers have been treated for years.
Previously I was a “Member” of:
'Group' AM000 Transportation Sustainability & Resilience
→ 'Section' AMS00 Transportation & Sustainability
→→ 'Committee' AMS30 Transportation Energy
→→→ 'Subcommittee' AMS30(2) Climate Change (also served as co-chair here for a time)
None of these exist anymore.
I've seen a few reactions on the Bluesite in the past few days, but nothing here prior to e-mail just now about the U.S. Transportation Research Board (#TRB) 'reorganizing' its volunteer committees.
The e-mail links to this new org chart: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/other/trb/standing-technical-committees/
Notably missing from every new committee name: words including #climate, #energy, #sustainability, and #justice.
This is a 'reorg' in the same sense as shoving a human body into a woodchipper.
“…because [Pope] Francis had a very domineering, some would say a very authoritarian type of personality.”
Ah it's _that_ particular kind of dweeb 😮💨
“So would you call, or would you not call, Thomas Aquinas a libertarian?”
This is what I'm punished with when I forget to bring my earbuds on the train 🙈 PPE for dangerous environmental levels of cringe.
Niléane
Ned Batchelder