BEYOND THE PALEWALL (10)

 1. Real Puzzling
   Many people up here are indoors working on jigsaw puzzles because that beats going outdoors or watching the news. A large 1000-piece puzzle, solidly coloured and with irregular edges, can keep you busy for quite a while. Looking for a bigger challenge, some senior folks in Utah, where they probably don't want to go outside either, ordered a 75 pounder consisting of 60,000 pieces. They went to work:

Over the next four months, about 50 seniors spent four hours a day piecing together 60 different 1,000-piece puzzle sections featuring a world map and 187 images of artwork by Dowdle of scenic landmarks such as the Colosseum in Rome, the Taj Mahal in India and U.S. national parks.
Last month, after the 60 puzzles were combined into one piece of art spread across 16 banquet tables, the senior center put its 8-by-29-foot creation on display for the public.

   Dowdle, the puzzle maker, operates "Dowdle Folk Art" which, conveniently enough is just down the road from the Springville Senior Center where the puzzle he made is on display. You can order "What A Wonderful World" - The World's Largest Puzzle" by clicking on this link. Before you do so, you should know that it is about 8' tall and 29' long and costs $1,027.00 in real dollars.
   All of this was learned from: "Utah Senior Center Tackles Loneliness With a 60,000-Piece Puzzle," Ruth Nielsen, Washington Post, Feb. 17, 2024. If you want to learn more, see the * Largest Jigsaw Puzzles in the World," Nancy Levin, largest.org, Jan. 19, 2023. The smallest offered is the 33,600-piece, "Wild Life" which costs $600 also real dollars. 

2. Build A Border Wall - A Northern One!
 Former presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy suggested one needed to be built because of the fentanyl problem, and Nikki Haley pointed out the problems presented by 500 people on the terrorist list who crossed over from Canada. More Republicans may be scrutinizing the Canadian/American border because of an article such as this one:
"Migrants Face Cold, Perilous Crossing From Canada to New York: Increasingly, Migrants From Latin America Are Risking Their Lives to Cross Illegally Into the United States Along the Northern Border," Luis Ferré-Sadurní, The New York Times, Feb. 11, 2024.

   As migrants continue to overwhelm the southern border in record numbers, a growing wave is trying an alternative route into the United States: across the less fortified, more expansive Canadian border….

More than 12,200 people were apprehended crossing illegally from Canada last year, a 241 percent jump from the 3,578 arrested the previous year. Most of them were Mexicans, who can fly to Canada without a visa and may prefer the northern border to avoid the cartels that exploit migrants in their country.

3. Dire Headline of the Decade - "Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?" 
 The subtitle of Clare Malone's Atlantic article (Feb.10) continued this way: Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience. She reports on
 A report that tracked layoffs in the industry in 2023 recorded twenty-six hundred and eighty-one in broadcast, print, and digital news media. NBC News, Vox Media, Vice News, Business Insider, Spotify, theSkimm, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, and Condé Nast—the publisher of The New Yorker—all made significant layoffs. BuzzFeed News closed, as did Gawker. The Washington Post, which lost about a hundred million dollars last year, offered buyouts to two hundred and forty employees. In just the first month of 2024, Condé Nast laid off a significant number of Pitchfork’s staff and folded the outlet into GQ; the Los Angeles Times laid off at least a hundred and fifteen workers (their union called it “the big one”); Time cut fifteen per cent of its union-represented editorial staff; the Wall Street Journal slashed positions at its D.C. bureau; and Sports Illustrated, which had been weathering a scandal for publishing A.I.-generated stories, laid off much of its staff as well.
The Fahrenheit 451 of everything without the fires.

4. Rankled by Rankings (again):
   The rankings game is played by most universities which hide low numbers and seek the higher ones. Although most would like to opt out, it is difficult to do so and arguments about how the rankings are done and disagreements between those ranked continue.
   Among the recent rankings disputes, you may have missed this one. It does not involve U.S. News & World Report or Maclean's. It does involve the Chinese (again) and math, but in this case neither of those subjects is inscrutable.

  To Disraeli's, "lies, damned lies and statistics," math can be added. It may even be the case that you can have a highly ranked math department in a university where there is no department of mathematics. Here is all you need to know and you don't need to know any math to understand it: "Citation Cartels Help Some Mathematicians - and Their Universities - Climb the Rankings," Michele Catanzaro, Science, Jan.30, 2024.

Cliques of mathematicians at institutions in China, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere have been artificially boosting their colleagues’ citation counts by churning out low-quality papers that repeatedly reference their work, according to an unpublished analysis seen by Science. As a result, their universities—some of which do not appear to have math departments—now produce a greater number of highly cited math papers each year than schools with a strong track record in the field, such as Stanford and Princeton universities.

   The ranking wars will continue, however, and if you google any university, the rankings will appear since good ones can be found somewhere. Those pictured are currently displayed at the university close by.