A few queued articles!

While there were some system problems, I collected a few articles of note…

Inside the U.S. government’s plans to survive a nuclear war – The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2017/05/18/inside-the-u-s-governments-plans-to-survive-a-nuclear-war/?utm_term=.0e29c4be8c39

When Did We Start Shopping at Stores? | JSTOR Daily

https://daily.jstor.org/when-did-we-start-shopping-at-stores/

In a 1979 paper, Gareth Shaw and M. T. Wild traced the beginnings of the store as it developed in British cities in the nineteenth century.

Shaw and Wild write that pre-industrial “retail” began with periodic markets or fairs. As more people moved to the cities, craftsmen began setting up local shops, selling their own products to their neighbors.

How surveying 1,000 people tells you what all Americans think | Pew Research Center

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/12/methods-101-random-sampling/

Here at Pew Research Center, we are often asked about how we conduct our research. We work hard to make our methodologies transparent and understandable, but we also know that survey mode effects and data weighting aren’t on everyone’s short list of water-cooler conversation topics.

That’s why we’re launching Methods 101, a new occasional video series dedicated to explaining and educating the public about the basic methods we use to conduct our survey research. We hope this effort will make survey methods more accessible, even if you’re not a statistician or pollster. We also hope it will help give our audience the confidence to be savvy consumers of all polls.

Our first video is about random sampling, a concept that undergirds all probability-based survey research. The video explains what it means and why it’s important. We hope you’ll find it useful.

Video Explainer: Understanding random sampling for public opinion surveys | Pew Research Center

http://www.pewresearch.org/2017/05/12/video-explainer-understanding-random-sampling-for-public-opinion-surveys/

10 Reasons to Join ASPA

http://www.aspanet.org/ASPA/Membership/ASPA_Benefits/ASPA/Membership/10-Reasons-to-Join.aspx

ASPA Benefits and 10 reasons to join…

How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeownership-became-the-engine-of-american-inequality.html

When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction — an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable.

A Fair Use Primer for Graduate Students | GradHacker

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/fair-use-primer-graduate-students

…just a few examples to give you a sense of the fair use exemption to copyright law. Although it is confusing, it is important to do your best to stay within the law

“Give Us Bread!” | JSTOR Daily

https://daily.jstor.org/give-us-bread/

For many years, scholars maintained that food riots were a phenomenon left behind in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Food riots were understood to be spontaneous, localized economic protests that had no place in the twentieth century’s strong, centralized countries with their increasingly national markets. The events of 1917 were considered to be an anomaly—except they continued through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. In 2007 and 2008, which saw steep increases in the prices of basic food commodities, there were food riots in 30 countries, from the “Pasta Protests” in Italy to the rice protests in Haiti. For the past year, Venezuela has been wracked by food shortages and riots, often quelled by tear gas and gunfire.

Faced with this reality, scholars have begun to reconsider food riots. More than a mass reaction to an immediate physical need, the food riot can also be seen as a form of cultural and political protest, often arising from groups outside the traditional power structure.

The Story of the Invention of the Potato Chip Is a Myth | JSTOR Daily

https://daily.jstor.org/story-invention-potato-chip-myth/

More than 150 years later Crum’s delicacy has gone on to even greater fame; today, Americans consume about 1.5 billion pounds of potato chips every year.

* * *

That’s the oft-repeated story about the invention of the potato chip. It’s a good one, an origin story that crosses cultural and economic boundaries for a snack food that does the same. Except for one small thing: That’s not what happened.

Inequality is getting worse, but fewer people than ever are aware of it – The Conversation

http://theconversation.com/inequality-is-getting-worse-but-fewer-people-than-ever-are-aware-of-it-76642

The data show a surprising pattern: The more unequal a society, the less likely its citizens are to notice. Paradoxically, citizens in some of the most unequal countries think theirs is the paragon of meritocracy.

‘Public goods’ made America great and can do so again

http://theconversation.com/public-goods-made-america-great-and-can-do-so-again-74421

The formal definition of a public good is that it’s something that is nonexcludable and nonrivalrous. That’s a fancy way of saying that everyone can take advantage of it and that one person’s use doesn’t reduce its availability to others.

Setting aside for a moment natural public goods, the ones provided by the government have been on the decline. U.S. public capital investment, net of depreciation, fell to just 0.4 percent of GDP in 2014 from 1.7 percent in 2007 and about 3 percent in the 1960s.