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Rabu, 30 Juni 2021

Inside the Turmoil at the Agency That Is Running Ranked-Choice Voting - The New York Times

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The Board of Elections, which has a history of mishaps, is now under intense fire for its error in releasing mayoral primary results.

As New Yorkers began to cast ballots in the first citywide election with ranked-choice voting, turmoil quietly roiled the government agency overseeing the election.

The agency, the New York City Board of Elections, had lost its executive director and one of his top deputies just weeks before early voting. It was being pressured to change its plan for releasing results.

And as Primary Day approached on June 22, the board’s remaining leaders had repeatedly declined help with the ranked-choice software and delayed training for employees, creating confusion among the staff.

On Tuesday, as the city eagerly awaited results in the mayoral primary and other major races, the problems burst into public view when the agency released preliminary ranked-choice vote totals — only to retract them hours later, acknowledging that they were no longer trustworthy.

Officials explained that the board had mistakenly included more than 130,000 test ballots in the preliminary count. A new ranked-choice tally was run on Wednesday, and the top-line results were unchanged: Eric Adams, who had the most first-place votes on primary night, was still the first choice, but by a far narrower numerical margin over his closest rival, Kathryn Garcia.

The results, however, seemed almost anticlimactic, with the memory of Tuesday’s snafu still causing outrage across the city and renewing calls for changes at the elections board. It also resurrected long-held frustrations about the barriers that have persistently blocked reforms at the agency, despite decades of blunders and scandals.

“It’s just one fiasco after another, year after year,” said Lulu Friesdat, executive director of Smart Elections, an elections reform group. “The fact that we haven’t made the effort to change that is shocking. It’s appalling.”

New York is the only state in the country with local election boards whose staffers are chosen almost entirely by Democratic and Republican Party bosses. The system is meant to ensure fairness by empowering the parties to watch each other, but for decades the board in New York City has been criticized for nepotism, ineptitude and corruption.

In recent years, the political appointees who run the board have stumbled again and again. They mistakenly purged about 200,000 people from voter rolls ahead of the 2016 election; they forced some voters to wait in four-hour lines on Election Day 2018; and they sent erroneous ballots to nearly 100,000 New Yorkers seeking to vote by mail last year.

Still, while some lawmakers have suggested reforms, the proposals have failed to gain much traction. The structure of the election board is enshrined in the New York State Constitution, so it is hard to change, and political leaders have little incentive to support any reforms because the current system gives them a lot of power.

The snafu in ranked-choice results created outrage across the city.
Dave Sanders for The New York Times

On Wednesday, facing anger and ridicule from across the political spectrum — including in a statement sent by former President Donald J. Trump — leaders in the New York State Senate and Assembly vowed to hold hearings to finally tackle problems at the board.

“The situation in New York City is a national embarrassment and must be dealt with promptly and properly,” said Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat who leads the Senate, in a statement. “In the coming weeks, the Senate will be holding hearings on this situation and will seek to pass reform legislation as a result at the earliest opportunity.”

Even as lawmakers promised reforms, the board acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that it had been operating through the election season without much of its leadership team.

Michael Ryan, who has served as the board’s executive director since 2013, has been on medical leave since early March, and Pamela Perkins, the agency’s administrative manager, retired on June 1 after nearly two decades in the position, a spokeswoman confirmed.

The New York Post reported Mr. Ryan’s medical leave earlier Wednesday.

Wilma Brown Phillips, who was chosen to succeed Ms. Perkins, started the job on Monday, meaning the board did not have an administrative manager on Primary Day.

In the absence of Mr. Ryan and Ms. Perkins, both Democrats, day-to-day operations were effectively run by the board’s two top Republicans, Dawn Sandow and Georgea Kontzamanis.

Ms. Sandow is a former executive director of the Bronx Republican Party with deep ties to Guy Velella, a longtime lawmaker and Bronx party leader who quit elected office in 2004 after pleading guilty in a bribery conspiracy.

The leadership vacuum — during an intense election, with a new method of voting — caused tumult at the board for months, several employees said.

As the board dealt with those issues, it also ignored offers of technological assistance from the supplier of the software that it would use to tabulate the ranked-choice votes.

The supplier, Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, first offered to help on May 26 and then tried again several times, said its policy director, Christopher W. Hughes.

“We had offered up to the Board of Elections to be there in person or remotely and support running the ranked-choice voting election,” Mr. Hughes said in an interview on Wednesday.

Mr. Hughes said the resource center could have run a parallel process, using the same data and a copy of the same software, to ensure that the results matched. Doing so would have made it more likely that they would have caught the test ballots that were inadvertently added to the tally on Tuesday, he said.

Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, a spokeswoman for the elections board, declined to address the substance of Mr. Hughes’s assertion.

Instead, she reiterated the board’s position that the problem was not caused by the software, but by the agency’s staff.

“The issue was not the software,” Ms. Vazquez-Diaz said. “There was a human error where a staffer did not remove the test ballot images from the Election Management System.”

Understanding the potential role of human error, Mr. Hughes had offered to train New York City election workers on the software, and to provide “remote or in-person support” when it came time to tabulate the vote.

His original proposal set out a budget of $90,000 for assistance through 2025, at the cost of $100 or $150 an hour. But he did not hear back, even after trying again on June 2, June 14 and finally, June 21, the day before the primary.

The organization’s software was used last year in primaries in Kansas, Wyoming and Alaska. Mr. Hughes said the center always offered some assistance to jurisdictions using its software.

“Other jurisdictions tended to be more responsive to outreach, though,” he said.

Dave Sanders for The New York Times

The board also got a late start in testing the software to generate the ranked-choice results because of an impasse with the State Board of Elections that took more than a year to resolve. As recently as a month before the election, the board still faced the possibility of having to count hundreds of thousands of ballots by hand.

Only on May 25 did the state board give a green light to the city board’s preferred software package, known as the Universal Ranked-Choice Voting Tabulator.

Douglas Kellner, the co-chairman of the state Board of Elections, said the delay was caused by the city election board itself, as well as resistance from Republicans on the state board.

“The city Board of Elections had other priorities, that was one issue,” Mr. Kellner said. “And when they finally got around to saying, ‘We have a ranked-choice voting election next year,’ the Republicans at the state Board of Elections started dragging their feet, because they question whether the city even had the authority to amend the charter to provide for this system of voting. So that added several months of additional delay.”

Delays also plagued the plan to train employees on the software and ranked-choice voting itself, workers said. Two employees said they did not receive training until after early voting had already begun.

A final challenge emerged when the board leaders struggled to decide how and when to release the results of the ranked-choice voting.

The board always planned to release only the results of first-choice votes by early voters and in-person voters on primary night. Initially, it planned to then wait until it had received all the absentee votes to conduct the instant runoff enabled by the ranked-choice part of the election.

However, officials had received pressure to release results earlier, including from Councilman Brad Lander, who proposed legislation last December to require earlier reporting. Some supporters of ranked-choice voting pushed to make raw voting data public early on, in part because they feared that if the absentee votes changed the results, critics would blame ranked-choice voting.

At the last minute — just a few days before Primary Day, employees said — the board settled on a compromise: It would release the results of an instant runoff just for the early votes and in-person voters, as something of a test of the system. That was the release on Tuesday, which was calculated erroneously and sparked the outrage.

The debate about when to release results surfaced as early as December, at an oversight hearing of the City Council.

At that hearing, Councilman Fernando Cabrera opened with a warning that now sounds prescient.

“2021 is the biggest year for local races in recent memory, with open contests for all citywide offices and two-thirds of the City Council seats,” he said. “We cannot afford to get this wrong.”

Michael Rothfeld contributed reporting.

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Vote Tally Mistake Causes Confusion In New York City Mayoral Race - NPR

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People vote during the Primary Election Day at P.S. 249 The Caton School on June 22 in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn borough in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

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The closely-watched New York City mayoral primary election tumbled into chaos this week as the NYC Board of Elections announced it had released incorrect preliminary results on Tuesday.

City officials admitted they failed to remove 135,000 test ballots from the election management system before starting to count the real votes from Election Day and early voting, skewing the results.

"The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported," the agency tweeted.

The error is complicated by the fact that New York City is using ranked-choice voting, in which each round of vote counting hinges on the results from the previous round.

Some of the top candidates vying to lead the country's largest city blasted the board's mistake as they — and about 8.5 million other New Yorkers — awaited the results of a revised tally expected to be released on Wednesday.

Ranked-choice voting, explained

Instead of choosing just one candidate to vote for, New York City voters in last week's election were able to rank their top five candidates in order of preference.

It was the first time in decades New York used ranked-choice voting, which city voters overwhelmingly approved in a 2019 ballot measure.

NPR's Domenico Montanaro explained how the process works:

  1. "If someone gets 50% plus one after all the first-choice votes are counted, then the election is over and that candidate wins. 
  2. "But if no one gets 50% plus one, it's on to Round 2.
  3. "The person with the lowest number of first-place votes is eliminated, and that candidate's voters' second choices get redistributed as votes for other candidates.
  4. "This reallocation of votes goes on until someone reaches 50% plus one."

If just two candidates remain at the end, the candidate with the most votes wins.

What happened this week

On Tuesday, the city Board of Elections released the first ranked-choice voting reports from the election.

With only first-preference votes counted as of election night, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams boasted a nine-point lead over attorney Maya Wiley. Those first reported ranked-choice results shrank Adam's lead to just two points ahead of former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, Gothamist reported.

But just hours later, the board tweeted that it had become aware of a "discrepancy" in the ranked-choice voting results and pulled them from its website.

In a follow-up apology, the board acknowledged that it had erroneously left 135,000 test votes in its election system, producing "additional records" that likely impacted an accurate tally.

"At this point it really seems like an issue of human error," WNYC reporter Brigid Bergin told NPR's Morning Edition.

"The board does conduct a lot of pre-election testing to make sure their systems are working and, obviously, that was even more important this time, because it was the first time they were using this new ranked-choice voting system," she added.

Bergin said the board is expected to release a corrected ranked-choice voting report Wednesday, but it will still be preliminary and it won't include 124,000 absentee ballots.

How the candidates are reacting

All of the mayoral contenders expressed frustration with the board's blunder.

"Today's mistake by the Board of Elections was unfortunate," Adams tweeted Tuesday. "It is critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system, especially as we rank votes in a citywide election for the first time."

Garcia, who was fleetingly thrust into second place by the incorrect ranked-choice voting report, called for a more thorough accounting of what went wrong.

"The Board of Elections' release of incorrect ranked choice votes is deeply troubling and requires a much more transparent and complete explanation. Every ranked choice and absentee vote must be counted accurately so that all New Yorkers have faith in our democracy and our government," she tweeted.

Progressive candidate Maya Wiley said this week's misstep was just the latest in a string of mistakes by the board.

"This error by the Board of Elections is not just failure to count votes properly today, it is the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed," Wiley said. "Today, we have once again seen the mismanagement that has resulted in a lack of confidence in results, not because there is a flaw in our election laws, but because those who implement it have failed too many times."

WNYC's Bergin said she thought the misstep would not cause voters to question the election results but that it may diminish the board's reputation in the eyes of the public.

"This agency is really the last bastion of true patronage politics in New York," she said. "There's been a push to overhaul the agency, to give the staff more authority over political appointees. But ultimately that's all up to state lawmakers to do."

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Demand Curve: 7 ad types that increase click-through rates - TechCrunch

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We’ve spent millions of dollars running ads for brands like Outschool, Imperfect Produce and Microsoft. At Demand Curve, we’ve worked with over 500 startups, meticulously documenting growth tactics for all growth channels. This post also incorporates what we’ve learned from our agency, Bell Curve.

Here are seven ad types that have proven to increase click-through rates (CTR), with examples of each. Clone them to test in your own social ad campaigns.

Address common complaints and questions directly in your ads, as they will help eliminate objections upfront and encourage clicking to learn more.

Customer reactions

If you’re selling a consumer product, it’s likely that some of your customers have posted product reviews, unboxings or recommendation videos on their social media accounts. You can use your customers’ user-generated videos in your social ads — with permission.

Search through Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for posts that mention your product. Reach out to the customer and ask them if you can use their content in an ad campaign, and subsequently, compile the most positive reactions into a video ad.

This works well because dramatic faces are attention magnets. Make sure the thumbnail photo shows a strong emotional image. People will click because they can’t help but want to see what provoked the emotion. User-generated reaction videos also highlight your products’ “Moment of Wow.” If users care enough about your product to make a positive reaction video, their energy is contagious. Your ad audience will connect your product with a strong positive emotion.

Customer reactions make for great ads

Customer reactions make for great ads. Image Credits: Demand Curve

You versus the competition

Comparison ads anchor your product against something your audience already knows. This works well for both ads and the landing page your ad will lead to when clicked on. Try positioning your strongest value proposition — the most valuable promise you’re making to your customer — against your generic competitors.

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Tom Brady mystery unraveled: Breaking down which NFL team chose 'that (expletive)' over the GOAT - CBS Sports

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Thanks to Tom Brady, the NFL industrial complex has a mystery to try to solve in the dead of the offseason. We have a case to crack, a riddle to unravel, in the dead of summer.

Just who are those "mother******s" that Tom Terrific was excoriating on "The Shop" on HBO? It's given many a media schlub like me something to write and talk about for a solid week now, and it doesn't look like it's fading anytime soon. When a GOAT, still doing his thing coming off yet another Lombardi (and arguably the most improbable of his ridiculous career), gets as candid as that, there's going to be some staying power, my friends.

It's going to withstand several media cycles and is not going away anytime soon. That clip will live forever, and Brady is the type of dude to let it linger during a dead period right into training camp. He's going to enjoy the theatre of it all, and having many a rival quarterback -- and front office and coaching staff, for that matter -- sweat it out.

Just what kind of backwards operation was Brady talking about, anyway? Who could that mystery team/GM/suspect QB be?

I'm not going to steer you wrong and tell you that I know for sure. I most definitely do not. And the larger reality is that the statement could be applied to any number of teams. A lot of teams. Including, first and foremost, the club Brady departed to eventually make his way down to Tampa. It cuts a wide swath. It's a pox on many a front office. Frankly, a lot of guys could wear this L (or, well, MF, in this case).

It got me to think back to last offseason, when Brady was on the free agent market, shopping his wares, choosing from among his suitors. How many front offices, in hindsight, look pretty foolish for not doing whatever was in their capacity to get Tom Bleeping Brady the one and only time he was ever going to be on the free agent market? How many owners and decision makers should have been far more proactive? How many misread Brady's abilities and their team's quarterback room and conspired to botch this?

Of course, Brady wasn't going to end up in any situation he didn't want to be in. No one was going to talk him into going someplace he didn't want to be. It's not all about money in this rare case -- which helped foster the Patriots dynasty -- and Brady was going to be very particular about who he chose to relaunch his career with. Weather and geography and lifestyle would all matter. But I can't help thinking back to March 2020 and recalling who chose to largely sit this out, or lacked the resolve to make it happen, and it's kind of crazy to think how many missed the mark.

Who could the mystery team be that chose to stick with "that" guy rather than go the distance to try to lure the GOAT? Alas, there are far too many contenders. Let's go division by division, shall we:

AFC East

Well, we know the Patriots' story, and the Bills were wedded to Josh Allen's development and Brady wasn't going to end up in Buffalo anyway. The Jets were a total train wreck with a coach everyone knew wasn't long for the role. Then there are the Dolphins. I will say I heard more chatter and scuttlebutt and theories about Brady and Giselle Bündchen coveting a spot on South Beach more than perhaps any other team. There were countless theories (some including an eventual ownership stake that many a well connected fellow would pass along). For me, any potential marriage ended when Miami chose Chan Gailey to run the offense (not a fit with Brady, and, well, he was gone in a year anyway). The Dolphins had not drafted Tua yet. You could connect a lot of dots and talk yourself into it making sense. Two games a year against Belichick would have been wild.

NFC East

Not really any fits here. Dallas was well down a road of trying to sign Dak Prescott to a long-term deal and he was already on the franchise tag. WFT? Nah. That wasn't on Brady's radar. The Eagles were wedded to a Carson Wentz offense after paying him huge bucks (not that it worked out), and the Giants were deep in a rebuild even if they can't admit it to themselves or others. But Brady knew. No one here fits.

AFC West

Given his West Coast ties and Hollywood production aspirations, many close to Brady believed the Chargers would always be in this thing. And they clearly did kick the tires. Everyone knew Philip Rivers wasn't going to be back. L.A. had some very talented pieces, but is this the kind of major move the Spanos family pulls off? Is this their lane? This is pre-Justin Herbert. You have to wonder if Brady had them in mind when he went off. And the Raiders obviously are being looked at with much scrutiny here, too. Is Derek Carr that guy? Iconic franchise in an international destination opening an amazing new stadium? Hmm. The Broncos could very well fit as well, with Drew Lock fitting the description, but I don't think that would have been a match, anyway. Chiefs, Patrick Mahomes, 'nuff said.

NFC West

The Rams, for all that went into them finally disengaging from Jared Goff one year later, should have been in this thing. Goff's extension was always bizarre. They could have kept all their picks and added TB12 in L.A. Alas, Goff's dead cap would have made that impossible a year ago. You can't help but wonder about the 49ers -- with Brady's former understudy at the helm in Jimmy G, the team trying to trade for Tom before and it being Brady's hometown team -- so they will get some scrutiny in this case. The Cardinals were all-in on Kyler Murray. Seattle has Russ.

AFC North

The Steelers should have been all about something like this, but it was all about Big Ben and their cap is always right. The Bengals were taking Joe Burrow. The Browns, with Brady, may have really been a thing, but do we see Tom in Cleveland? Can't be them. The Ravens have Lamar. This isn't Brady's division.

NFC North

Remember back before the Packers were in a full-fledged feud with Aaron Rodgers? Yeah, me too. Detroit is a non-starter. No way Tom plays in Minnesota, although them doubling-down on Kirk Cousins a year ago did surprise some people. And the Bears should have been recruiting Brady like crazy, though in the end I don't think he goes there or that they are the team he would be referencing here.

AFC South

Let's be real, Brady wasn't going to any of these places or thinking about going to any of these places. Nashville, maybe, kinda, I guess, though they had hitched their wagon to Ryan Tannehill for good reason.

NFC South

I wouldn't downplay the Saints' odds here at all. Drew Brees was done and Brady and Sean Payton would have been an amazing combination and they were loaded and in win-now mode. Cutting the cord with Brees would be tricky, but Brady just went through a messy divorce himself so I don't think that would have held him back here. No way he was even thinking about the Falcons or the Panthers and he picked the Bucs.

So, yeah, Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vegas. Hard not to keep coming back to them. The precise culprit probably is somewhere at the top of this paragraph. Brady will likely never tell ... or at least not for a long time. And the bigger truth is that at least eight to 10 more teams should have been all over this, and they missed out, too.

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Fewer CEOs are serving on outside boards. That’s good (and bad) - TechCrunch

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It used to be a heavily traveled two-way street in corporate America: CEOs joined other companies’ boards to broaden their experiences, expand their influence, or simply because it felt good. Boards sought out CEOs because of the knowledge they bring and their unique ability to interact with the company CEO as an equal.

But the number of sitting CEOs on outside boards keeps shrinking. As the CEO role has become more difficult and demanding, greater numbers of chief executives are shying away from external board roles and many boards now limit their own CEOs’ board assignments as well.

The pandemic accelerated the trend, according to a report by management consulting firm Korn Ferry, citing “evidence that the unprecedented demands posed by the pandemic led many CEO directors to resign from outside boards to focus on their own organizations.” Fewer than half of CEOs now serve on an outside board, the report said.

One good thing about the drop in CEO board assignments is more opportunity for non-CEOs and other traditionally underrepresented groups to join corporate boards.

At the same time, many corporations are feeling pressure to bring more gender and racial diversity to their boards and are making membership available to a broader array of candidates than in the past.

Is the decrease in CEO board participation a positive or negative? Interestingly, it’s both.

Here are four benefits of CEOs serving on boards:

Advising another company can make for a better CEO. CEOs who opt out of corporate board directorships out of fear of overextending themselves — and boards who restrict their own CEOs’ board assignments for the same reason — miss a key point: Time on a board usually makes them a better leader.

I’m on two outside boards. An inside view of another company’s challenges and opportunities, its peaks and valleys, what strategies worked and didn’t, has revealed insights I’ve ended up applying at my own company. Being on the other side of the table has even helped me better understand how to communicate with my company’s board.

Serving on a board can prevent myopia. Because of digital disruption, businesses must move at an unprecedented pace to stay competitive. Job No. 1 for all CEOs is to act on this reality every day inside their companies. But drawing exclusively from their own company’s experience can blind a leader to broader perspectives in the outside world. A board stint is a great way to ensure they’re getting those.

Board memberships can make CEOs more empathetic. There’s a lot of talk these days about the need for heightened empathy in the C-suite, and with good reason: The global health crisis, racial injustice and other extraordinary stressors demand that senior executives possess what McKinsey described as four qualities “to manage in crisis and shepherd their organization into a post-crisis next normal” — awareness, vulnerability, empathy and compassion.

In these times, it’s critically important for a CEO to cultivate as wide a frame of reference as possible, and involvement with another company through a board directorship accomplishes that.

Helping another company does broader good. If a CEO has the wherewithal beyond their own company responsibilities to bring value to another firm’s board, that’s a positive for the world at large. A rising tide lifts all boats, after all.

For example, I’m a board member at a company that once was strictly a manufacturer of home standby generators. It’s now digital savvy, with Wi-Fi-equipped generators providing a number of services on users’ smartphones. This means they also needs a strong cybersecurity strategy, my area of expertise. I take satisfaction in believing my guidance is benefiting the company, its shareholders and its customers.

So what’s good about the drop in CEO board assignments? That’s easy: more opportunity for non-CEOs and other traditionally underrepresented groups, including women and people of color, to join corporate boards.

“In a little-noticed but remarkable shift, many firms are skipping the corner suite and looking elsewhere for directors,” Korn Ferry reported. “Recent data shows that nearly two-thirds of the more than 400 director seats filled last year were taken by someone other than a CEO. Experts say since both the pandemic and the racial-equality protests of last year, companies are determined to create boards with more diverse faces and more specific skill sets.”

Equilar’s most recent Gender Diversity Index found that at the end of Q1 2021, 24.3% of all board seats in the Russell 3000 were occupied by women, up from 15% at the end of 2016. “The path toward equal representation of men and women in public company boardrooms seemed to go nowhere for decades, but there has been a significant clearing in recent years,” the report said. (Nevertheless, Equilar cautions that boards won’t hit gender parity until 2032.)

And many of these non-CEO board members are doing an excellent job. According to a survey by Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, 79% of board members feel that, in practice, active CEOs are no better than non-CEO board members. A CEO may bring cachet to the board, but many non-CEOs contribute real work as a director, the study said.

Increased diversity on boards isn’t just an excellent development by itself; board experience positions members well for future leadership roles and thus can act as a proxy to get more women and people of color into corner offices.

Making board membership accessible to a wider range of candidates beyond typically white male CEOs — they still account for almost 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs — offers hope that diversity in the business leader ranks will keep rising.

All things considered, I think this potential outweighs the negatives of more CEOs staying out of outside companies’ board rooms.

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Journal impact factor gets a sibling that adjusts for scientific field - Science Magazine

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Critics have long bashed Clarivate Analytics’s journal impact factor, complaining that the metric, which reports average citations per article, has methodological flaws that support misleading comparisons of journals and researchers. Today, the company unveiled an alternative metric that improves on some of these flaws by allowing more accurate comparisons of journals in different disciplines.

The new Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) accounts for the substantially different rates of publication and citation in different fields, Clarivate says. But the move is drawing little praise from the critics, who say the new metric remains vulnerable to misunderstanding and misuse.

The announcement comes as part of the company’s 2021 release of its Journal Citation Reports database. It includes the latest journal impact factors and other journal analytics. Among these is the new JCI, which averages citations gathered by a journal over 3 years of publications, compared with just 2 years for the impact factor. What’s more, Clarivate says the JCI includes journals not covered by the impact factor, including some in the arts and humanities, as well as regional journals or those from “emerging” scientific fields. 

The JCI is “a step forward” and “better late than never,” says Henk Moed, a bibliometrician and editor-in-chief of the journal Scholarly Assessment Reports. Its main advance, he explains, is not new at all: For decades, researchers in bibliometrics have been developing methods to compare citation impact across disciplines. For instance, where math papers might cite just a handful of sources, biochemistry papers commonly have citation lists with dozens or even hundreds of entries. So, “It’s not a sign of quality that biochemistry papers are cited more,” Moed says. Impact factors, which simply total up citations without accounting for the norm in a field, miss this fact.

For that reason, in 2010, Moed developed the methodology for a different metric—the Source Normalized Impact by Paper (SNIP)—that was adopted by a Clarivate competitor, the publishing giant Elsevier, in its Scopus bibliometric database.

Now, Clarivate’s JCI, which uses a different methodology, provides a metric similar to the SNIP for the journals in its Journal Citation Reports database. That will strengthen Clarivate’s position in the market, Moed says.

But Clarivate’s announcement leaves a lot to be desired, including transparency, says Marianne Gauffriau, a research librarian at Copenhagen University Library. The company’s white paper describing the new metric does not cite any of the substantial literature published by bibliometricians over the years, she says. The problem extends further than just giving credit where it is due, because the lack of citation makes it impossible to know what past lessons and research Clarivate has baked into the JCI: “There are a lot of people working to try to improve these indicators,” she says. “You should use that knowledge.”

There is also the risk that, like the impact factor, the JCI will be used inappropriately, Gauffriau says. Frequently, evaluators for tenure awards and other decisions use such metrics to judge the scholarly output of researchers, institutions, and individual publications—a practice that is often criticized by bibliometricians as a flawed way to judge quality.

Clarivate has tried to head off misuse of the JCI from the start, says Martin Szomszor, director of the company’s Institute for Scientific Information. It has made clear in describing the JCI that it’s not designed for assessing individual researchers. “If you’re using this in a research evaluation setting, this is probably a bad thing,” he says. “Don’t do it.” He says the intended use is for those who own portfolios of journals—including publishers, university presses, and society journals—to see how their journals stack up across fields. But, Moed counters, the analytics industry should put more effort into explaining the limits of the indicators they offer.

The JCI is unlikely to elbow out the widely used journal impact factor any time soon, Szomszor says. Clarivate will wait to see how widely the metric is adopted, giving it a chance to develop as a parallel option.

But despite its many strong points, the JCI may not, in fact, gain much traction, says publishing consultant Phil Davis. Based on the lukewarm uptake of other, similar metrics—like Elsevier’s SNIP—the new indicator could have a difficult path ahead, he says: “I believe the JCI will be largely ignored, like SNIP.”

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Dinosaurs were already struggling before the asteroid strike that doomed them to extinction, study finds - CNN

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But what were their lives like before it hit? Whether they were thriving or already teetering on the brink has long been a matter of debate for paleontologists.
A new study suggests that dinosaurs were in decline for as many as 10 million years before the city-sized asteroid that hit off the coast of what is now Mexico dealt the final death blow and that this decline impeded their ability to recover from the asteroid's aftermath.
The strike created the 125-mile-wide Chicxulub crater, unleashing climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, ultimately killing off three quarters of life on the planet.
The researchers looked at a total of 1,600 dinosaur fossils representing 247 dinosaur species to assess species diversity and extinction rates for six dinosaur families.
"We looked at the six most abundant dinosaur families through the whole of the Cretaceous (period), spanning from 150 to 66 million years ago, and found that they were all evolving and expanding and clearly being successful," said study lead author, Fabien Condamine, a researcher from the Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier in France in a news release.
"Then, 76 million years ago, they show a sudden downturn. Their rates of extinction rose and in some cases, the rate of origin of new species dropped off."
The authors of the study that published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications said that global climate cooling during the Late Cretaceous period (100 to 66 million years ago) may have contributed to the decline of non-avian dinosaurs. (Avian or bird-like dinosaurs survived the asteroid strike and evolved into the birds we see today).
They also said that particularly successful families of dinosaurs like hadrosaurs may have outcompeted other herbivores, leading to a decline in diversity of those dinosaurs.
The researchers used computer modeling techniques that accounted for uncertainties including incomplete fossil records to converge on the most probable result.
"In the analyses, we explored different kinds of possible causes of the dinosaur decline," said Mike Benton, another co-author of the study and a professor from the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences.
"It became clear that there were two main factors, first that overall climates were becoming cooler, and this made life harder for the dinosaurs which likely relied on warm temperatures."Then, the loss of herbivores made the ecosystems unstable and prone to extinction cascade. We also found that the longer-lived dinosaur species were more liable to extinction, perhaps reflecting that they could not adapt to the new conditions on Earth," Benton said in a news release
Their research contradicts other recent studies, using alternative methods, that have laid the blame for dinosaur extinction solely on the asteroid and found that there's no strong evidence that dinosaurs were in decline before the asteroid hit -- that in fact they may have continued to thrive.
Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist and postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Vigo in Spain, who was not involved in the study, said that the authors had assigned too much importance to the cooling trend toward the end of the Cretaceous period. He said that dinosaurs had weathered similar climate fluctuations throughout the 165 million years they roamed the Earth.
Joseph Bonsor, a doctoral candidate at the University of Bath, who was an author of a study that found that dinosaurs weren't on the way out before the asteroid hit, said the ultimate limiting factor in this type of work is the patchy nature of the fossil record -- the study predominantly relied on North American fossils.
"There are huge biases in the fossil record due to a number of factors (mainly geographical and economical, but also more personal biases like palaeontologists focusing on looking for one species for example, like Tyrannosaurus)," he said via email.
"The fact that multiple groups of scientists working on the exact same question at the same time can come up with completely opposite results further enforces this, that there is a great need for further data collection, i.e. digging up more dinosaurs and finding out where they lived and how successful they truly were," he added.

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Why is this Iberia damaged luggage claim taking forever? - The Boston Globe

Q. I was flying from Porto, Portugal, to Madrid, on Iberia. The airline damaged my checked bag, a soft-sided upright bag, tearing a side corner out.

I filed a claim for $129 in damages. I provided Iberia with a receipt for the luggage. It’s been more than three months, but I haven’t heard anything from Iberia. Can you help me with my claim?

HELENE ROSENTHAL, Bedford

A. I’m sorry about your damaged luggage. Iberia should have taken better care of your personal belongings. And if it damaged your bag, it should have acknowledged the problem and fixed it promptly. It didn’t.

Airlines that toss your luggage around really annoy me. How hard can it be to treat your belongings with care? And that’s particularly true if you’re paying the airline a luggage fee to transport your stuff. Come on!

Since you were flying within the EU, you were covered by EC 261, the European airline passenger rights regulation. Under EC 261, if your checked-in luggage is lost, damaged, or delayed, the airline is liable. You’re entitled to compensation up to an amount of approximately 1,300 euros. But if an “inherent defect” caused the damage, then you’re not entitled to any compensation.

Unfortunately, EC 261 doesn’t give the airline a firm deadline. But I think we can all agree that three months is long enough to wait for an airline to respond.

You could have reached out to one of the executive contacts at Iberia. I list the names, numbers, and e-mail addresses of Iberia’s managers on my consumer advocacy site at www.elliott.org/company-contacts/iberia-airlines.

You also can contact the EU member state airline regulation body via the European Consumer Centres Network at https://ec.europa.eu/. Like the US Department of Transportation, these government organizations have the power to light a figurative fire under an airline like Iberia, and they often do.

I know what you’re thinking, dear readers. What about the pandemic? Shouldn’t we cut Iberia some slack about a delayed refund? After all, the airline industry has suffered so much. But this damaged luggage incident happened before the pandemic, so the pandemic is not a valid excuse, I’m afraid.

Why do airlines drag their wings on a damaged luggage case like this? Because they can. There’s no regulatory body policing the claims process. If passengers give up and go away, that’s one less claim an airline like Iberia has to pay.

I contacted Iberia on your behalf, and it processed your claim in full.

Christopher Elliott is the chief advocacy officer of Elliott Advocacy, a nonprofit organization that helps consumers resolve their problems. Elliott’s latest book is “How To Be The World’s Smartest Traveler” (National Geographic). Contact him at elliott.org/help or chris@elliott.org.

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Games that Never Came: Notre Dame, 4/01/18 - Card Chronicle

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Fans, coaches, and athletes of every school, team, franchise, and sport have those “If Only” battles through the years, the ones that never came about.

This here’s-what-never-happened series of indeterminate duration features what might have been but never was for various Louisville Cardinal contingents through the decades.

If you have any suggestions, put them in the Comments section below.

First up, the national championship tilt, Jeff Walz’s women’s basketball squad never played against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in 2018.

March 30, 2018. Columbus, Ohio.

The U of L Cards suffered a serious setback, down 2, with 2:42 to play in the national semi-final against Mississippi State.

Eye of the Tiger pivot Sam Fuerhing didn’t like a call. She slapped the floor in disgust and frustration. The T was her 5th. DQ.

The Bulldogs converted both charity tosses, for a four point advantage.

The Cardinals fought back. Arica Carter tallied to put Louisville up one. Then, with only eleven ticks left on the clock, Myisha Hines-Allen netted a reverse lay up for a three point lead.

But, four seconds later, State’s Roshunda Johnson went Et Tu, her threeball pulling the Bulldogs even.

U of L had no timeouts to advance the ball. Hines-Allen raced the rock down the court, a half step ahead of the pack. Then, undercut and sideswiped, she missed a game winning left handed layup.

Discombobulated, the Cards faltered in OT, hitting but one of ten FG attempts. They lost 63-73.

The Bulldogs, not the Cards, met Notre Dame for the national crown two days later.

Oh my, what might have been.

* * * * *

That Louisville gang was a beast, one of the best ensembles of Cardinal hoopsters ever, regardless of gender.

They steamrolled through the season, with only two Ls, Florida State by a digit in late January, and at UConn several weeks later by 9.

In the Dance, they clobbered their first four foes — Boise State, Marquette, Stanford and Oregon State — by an average margin of 27.5.

They had already conquered Notre Dame twice.

During a 33 point evisceration of ND at Freedom Hall, in which Asia Durr put on a shooting clinic, I opined the following to several fellow scribes along press row at the half.

“Best shooter ever to wear the red and black.” I don’t believe I even inferred a question mark at the end of that pontification.

U of L bested their rivals again in the ACC tourney final.

Might they have pulled it off a third time for the crown?

That Irish squad was down to 7 players on scholly, because of an epidemic of ACL injuries, including one to preseason A-A Brianna Turner. But Muffet McGraw’s team had gotten its act together.

Their Final Four conquests are best remembered for the absolute absurd improbability of Arike Ogunbonwale hitting an off balance three point OT buzzer beater to upend UConn in the semi. Then eerily doing it again against Mississippi State in the Final.

Would U of L have completed the triple against Notre Dame for the first national title? Or were the Irish just the proverbial team of destiny?

Sigh. We just don’t know.

—c d kaplan

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Progressives Hope Justice Stephen Breyer Steps Down - NPR

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Progressive activists are watching the end of the Supreme Court session for a possible retirement announcement from Stephen Breyer, the court's oldest current justice. Breyer will turn 83 in August. Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP/Pool

Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP/Pool

For Erwin Chemerinsky, this is a familiar feeling: Seven years ago, the dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law publicly called for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire from the Supreme Court because he reasoned too much was at stake in the 2016 elections.

Ginsburg didn't listen then, but he's hoping Justice Stephen Breyer will listen now — but Breyer has given no indication whether he plans to stay or go.

"If he wants someone with his values and views to take his place, now is the time to step down," Chemerinsky told NPR.

Progressive activists are hoping that Breyer, who will turn 83 in August, will announce he is retiring Thursday, the same day the Supreme Court delivers its final two opinions of the term. But a justice can decide to retire at any time — though both Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor announced their respective retirements at the end of the court's session.

Chemerinsky is part of a growing rank of progressives who are breaking with the polite, political norms of the past when it comes to questioning service on the Supreme Court. Ginsburg's death last year and the subsequent appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to deliver a conservative supermajority on the court had a lot to do with that.

"I think a lot of people who thought that silence was the best approach in 2013 came to regret that in the aftermath of [Ginsburg's] untimely passing last year," said Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice. "I think it would be foolish of us to repeat this same mistake and to greet the current situation passively and not do everything we can to signal to Justice Breyer, that now is the time for him to step down"

Since Democrats took control of the Senate in January, Demand Justice has organized public demonstrations, billboard and ad campaigns, and assembled a list of scholars and activists to join their public pressure campaign for Breyer to retire.

The risk, as Fallon sees it, is twofold. The first is the perils of a 50-50 Senate.

"The Democrats are one heartbeat away from having control switch in the Senate," he said. "There's a lot of octogenarian senators, many of whom have Republican governors that might get to appoint a successor to them if the worst happened."

The second is the 2022 midterms when control of the Senate will be in play.

"If [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell reassumes the Senate majority leader post, at worst, he might block any Biden pick, and at best, Biden is going to have to calibrate who he selects in order to get them through a Republican-held Senate."

Both Chemerinsky and Fallon concede the public campaign is not without some risk.

"I've certainly heard from some that this might make him less likely to retire, perhaps to dig in his heels," Chemerinsky said.

The campaign has also not caught fire on Capitol Hill, where only a small handful of progressive senators have — tactfully — suggested they'd like to see Breyer retire of his own accord.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., told CNN this month he did not support any Senate-led pressure campaigns on the court, but he added: "My secret heart is that some members, particularly the 82-year-old Stephen Breyer, will maybe have that thought on his own, that he should not let his seat be subject to a potential theft."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., also distanced himself from the public retirement push, telling NPR: "I'm not on that campaign to put pressure on Justice Breyer. He's done an exceptional job. He alone can make the decision about his future. And I trust him to make the right one."

Absent any change in the status quo, Democrats will control the Senate at least until 2023. If the court's session ends without a retirement announcement, Fallon said he expects the calls for Breyer's retirement will grow louder. It's all part of what he said is a new, more aggressive position on the Supreme Court from the left.

"In some way, we are trying to make a point that progressives for too long, have taken a hands-off approach to the court," he said. "And they've been sort of foolish for doing so because the other side doesn't operate that way."

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'I really started falling in love with her, so we made that move' - Birmingham Times

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BY JE’DON HOLLOWAY-TALLEY

Special to the Birmingham Times

“You Had Me at Hello’’ highlights married couples and the love that binds them. If you would like to be considered for a future “Hello’’ column, or know someone, please send nominations to Barnett Wright at bwright@birminghamtimes.com. Include the couple’s name, contact number(s) and what makes their love story unique.

TRE AND JASMINE KING

Live: Fairfield

Married: June 3, 2017

Met: At Continental Ballroom in Homewood, in March 2010. “I was out with my best friend having a girls night, minding my business when out of the blue Tre grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let it go,” Jasmine remembered. “I looked at him like he was crazy and tried to walk off, but he wouldn’t let my hand go so we stood there for a minute staring at each other.”

Tre had his mind made up that he would get Jasmine’s phone number. “I told her she looked good and that she need to let me get that number.”

“And I said, no, I’m good, but he still refused to let me go,” Jasmine laughed, “he insisted I give him my number, and my best friend Vanessa went on and gave it to him so we could go on about our business. I had a boyfriend at the time so I wasn’t really interested…”

Jasmine would eventually become single and Tre didn’t waste any time.

First date: Valentine’s Day 2011, Stix Japanese restaurant in Hoover. Jasmine recalled Tre picking her up from home in McCalla and his gentleman behavior.

“He was different, he was caring and concerned… We were starting to take each other a little more seriously, we were moving out of the friend zone and into being lovers,” Jasmine said. “We had a nice time, we enjoyed spending time like that with one another.”

“I thought she looked real nice and I enjoyed her personality,” Tre said.

The turn: Early 2012. “We couldn’t get enough of one another and wanted to spend all our extra time with each other, so we decided to take things to the next level and bought our house in Fairfield,” Jasmine said.

“I really started falling in love with her, so we made that move,” Tre said.

The proposal: August 2014, Jasmine and Tre had their son, Trace, and wanted to make their family official. In February 2016, Tre gave Jasmine a ring and they set a date.

“I was excited and happy to know that we were about to officially become a family,” said Jasmine.

“I was happy that I was making the decision to spend the rest of my life with her,” said Tre.

The wedding: At the Shields Conference Center at W. C. Patton Patton Park in Birmingham, officiated by Rev. T.N. Miller. Their colors were black, white and pink.

Most memorable for the bride was being stuck in traffic on her way to her wedding.

“Work was being done on the 20/59 [interstate] which caused me to be extremely late, everyone was calling me trying to see where I was,” Jasmine said. “I walked in two hours late and straight down the aisle. When I saw Tre had started crying I started feeling relieved and a sense of joy because I had finally made it and my wedding was happening.”

Most memorable for the groom was anticipating his bride’s arrival.

“I was mad she had me waiting for two hours,” Tre said. “I was ready to get it over with, and when she was coming through the door I started shedding tears and saying to myself that I can’t believe this is finally happening, I’m marrying my best friend.”

The couple honeymooned in Destin, Florida for three days. “We really enjoyed spending our first few days officially husband and wife, we felt like we fell in love all over again,” Jasmine said.

Words of wisdom: “Always pray and keep God first. Always communicate and compromise with one another. Keep people out of your business and always have a positive support system among you,” Jasmine said. “Always remember why you started and the purpose of it all– love.”

“Always have faith in anything you’re doing, and always see the good in each other and understand what the other person is going through. Stay focused on the path you guys are going towards,” Tre said.

Happily ever after: The King’s have two children, son, Trace, 6, and daughter, Tinsley, 1 year old.

Jasmine, 30, a Warner Robins, Georgia native, and Brentwood Christian Academy [Bessemer] grad. She works as a consultant for a financial institute, and owner of Event Design and Decor Business Jas It Up LLC.

Tre, 30, is a Pratt City native, and P.D. Jackson Olin High School grad. He works as a groundsman for Utility Line Construction Services.

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China is facing its worst power shortage in a decade. That's a problem for the whole world - CNN

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Several Chinese provinces have said they are facing a power crunch in recent weeks, including some of the country's most important engines for economic growth.
Guangdong province — a manufacturing center responsible for $1.7 trillion, or more than 10%, of China's annual economic output and a bigger share of its foreign trade — has been rationing power for over a month. The restrictions have forced companies across the province to shut down for a few days per week. Some local authorities are warning that power rationing could last through the end of the year.
It's not just Guangdong. At least nine provinces have said they are dealing with similar issues, including Yunnan, Guangxi and the manufacturing hub of Zhejiang, forcing regional authorities to announce power curbs across an area of China the size of the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan combined.
The power crunch even contributed to a slowdown in factory activity growth in China in June, the country's National Bureau of Statistics acknowledged on Wednesday.
It's the worst energy shortage in China since 2011, when droughts and surging coal prices pushed 17 provinces or regions to curb electricity use. Power plants are reluctant to produce a lot of electricity when the coal they burn is expensive: Beijing controls the cost of power, so producers can't simply raise their prices.
This time around, the post-pandemic commodities boom and severe weather are once again forcing coal power plants to curb output, while also hampering hydroelectricity. But there's a key difference: China is also grappling with how to meet President Xi Jinping's push for a carbon neutral China by 2060. That ambitious target for the world's biggest coal consumer has led the country's coal mines to produce less, resulting in higher prices, according to Yao Pei, chief strategist for Chinese brokerage firm Soochow Securities.

A one-two punch to the economy

The shortages could deliver a one-two punch that may knock China's fragile recovery off course, while spelling further trouble for global supply chains that are already struggling to cope.
"The power rationing will inevitably hurt the economy," said Yan Qin, lead carbon analyst for Refinitiv.
A shortage of electricity could reduce output across virtually every sector of the economy, including key construction and manufacturing industries. Such businesses used nearly 70% of China's electricity last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, and have been major drivers of the recovery in 2021.
Guangdong-based Chengde New Material, one of the country's largest stainless steel producers, told clients late last month that it would shut operations for two days per week until power no longer needs to be rationed. The company expects production volumes to decline by 20%, or as much as 10,000 tons of steel per month.
"The companies are not happy about this," said Klaus Zenkel, chair of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in South China. He said as many as 80 of the chamber's member companies might have been affected by the government's orders to suspend operations for a few days a week, adding that domestic manufacturers have been forced to stagger production, too. Some companies have even started renting expensive diesel generators to keep business going, he said.
The power rationing in key metal producing province Yunnan has even caused a decline in the supply of some types of metals, including aluminum and tin, according to government data and independent research.
The production cuts and prospect of missed delivery deadlines across China also risks stretching an already tight global supply chain. Guangdong alone is a manufacturing heartland that accounts for a quarter of China's total trade, including clothes, toys and electronics.
"It [the power shortage] might add to the shipping delays which can be felt around the globe," said Henning Gloystein, director of energy, climate and resources at Eurasia Group.
Adding to the pressure is that Guangdong has already seen its incredibly busy container ports clogged by a Covid outbreak. The shipping backlog could take months to clear and lead to shortages during the year-end holiday shopping season. That leaves little room for any additional problems, such as the power shortages.
"The power shortage may lead to work schedule rearrangement for local manufacturers, challenging the timeliness of delivery [and] therefore the rest of the supply chains," said Lara Dong, senior director for power and renewables in Greater China at IHS Markit.

High demand and extreme weather

Experts attribute the scale of the power crunch to a host of issues, from high demand for energy to extreme weather.
Beijing's infrastructure-led economic recovery plan is very carbon intensive, according to Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst for the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Through the first five months of the year, power consumption in South China exceeded pre-pandemic levels — up 21% from the same period in 2019, according to the China Southern Power Grid, a big state-owned grid operator.
Coal is still involved in generating some 60% of the country's power. But the government is wary of that figure rising any higher — and so has been trying to reduce coal consumption as it tries to achieve its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2060.
Limitations on coal usage, though, have coincided with a thirst for energy caused by economic rejuvenation, along with extreme weather. That's causing a growing tension between demand and supply.
Exceptionally hot weather in some areas has led to an increase in power demand, as people use more air conditioning and refrigeration.
Meanwhile, there's a huge strain on energy production. Renewable energy sources, such as hydropower, have been hobbled by drought. Major hydropower hub Yunnan province, for example, has had trouble retaining the water it needs in its reservoirs, according to Myllyvirta.
A nationwide safety check before the Communist Party's 100th anniversary on Thursday has led to massive suspensions of coal mines across China, exacerbating the strains on the coal supply.
The check comes after a jump in deadly coal incidents recently, in some cases due to illicit mining activity. To "create a harmonious environment" before the anniversary, many coal mines have been ordered to shut for inspections, according to local governments or state firms.
"Political stability is the top priority now until end of July," Qin said.
China has also struggled to shore up overseas supply. Coal is really expensive to import, according to Eurasia Group's Gloystein, who said that prices have more than doubled in the last year.
Gloystein also pointed out that trade tensions with Australia — which in 2019 was responsible for nearly 60% of China's thermal coal imports — have created a strain. Beijing imposed trade barriers against Australian coal last year after Canberra called for an independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19.
Since then, China has imported more coal from Indonesia and South Africa to make up for the deficit, but that hasn't filled the gap.
"This has left some Chinese utilities short of fuel for their power stations," Gloystein said, adding that it's tough to get extra supply on short notice from places like Indonesia.

Shortages could continue

Power shortages are likely to continue for at least the next few months, especially as demand stays high in the hot summer months. Qin from Refinitiv said that there are "still significant risks" that southern and central China will need to continue rationing power, especially if the weather is hotter than normal.
The government has other options, too. Gloystein suggested that China could remove barriers against Australian coal, although "that would make Beijing look rather weak."
And ultimately, authorities may have to think about giving way on some climate targets. He suggested that Beijing could "throw back online" power plants that were shut down earlier this year to curb excess pollution.
Qin said that power shortages are likely to remain a problem "quite often" for at least a while, though. China seems committed to controlling dirty energy, and is trying to up its use of renewable sources and reduce the use of fossil fuels.
"The issue facing China's power supply is how to both meet rising electrification needs and decarbonization goal," Qin said, adding that while China is developing a lot of renewable energy sources, those sources aren't yet as stable as ones that use fossil fuels.

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